By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I am very grateful for the many thoughtful postings in response to my outline of the fundamental theoretical upper bound of little more than 1.2 K on climate sensitivity imposed by the process-engineering theory of maintaining the stability of an object on which feedbacks operate. Here are some answers to points raised by correspondents.
Iskandar says, “None of these feedbacks or forcings are ever given in the form of a formula.” In fact, there are functions for the forcings arising from each of the principal species of greenhouse gas: they are tabulated in Myhre et al., 1998, and cited with approval in IPCC (2001. 2007). However, Iskandar is right about temperature feedbacks. Here, the nearest thing to a formula for a feedback is the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, which states that the space occupied by the atmosphere is capable of carrying near-exponentially more water vapor as it warms. However, as Paltridge et al. (2009) have indicated, merely because the atmosphere can carry more water vapor there is no certainty that it does. The IPCC’s values for this and other feedbacks are questionable. For instance, Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011, pace Dessler, 2010, 2011) have challenged the IPCC’s estimate of the cloud feedback. They find it as strongly negative (attenuating the warming that triggers it) as the IPCC finds it strongly positive (amplifying the original warming), implying a climate sensitivity of less than 1 K. Since feedbacks account for almost two-thirds of all warming in the IPCC’s method, and since it is extremely difficult to measure – still less to provide a formula for – the values of individual temperature feedbacks, an effort such as mine to identify a constraint on the magnitude of all feedbacks taken together is at least worth trying.
Doug says we cannot be sure when the dolomitic rocks were formed. What is certain, however, according to Professor Ian Plimer, who gave me the information, is that they cannot form unless the partial pressure of CO2 above the ocean in which they form is 30%, compared with today’s 0.04%. Yet, during the long era when CO2 concentrations were that high, glaciers came and went, twice, at sea level, and at the equator. Even allowing for the fact that the Sun was a little fainter then, and that the Earth’s albedo was higher, the presence of those glaciers where there are none today does raise some questions about the forcing effect of very high CO2 concentrations, and, a fortiori, about the forcing effect of today’s mere trace concentration. However, in general Doug’s point is right: it is unwise to put too much weight on results from the paleoclimate, particularly when there is so much scientific dispute about the results from today’s climate that we can measure directly.
Dirk H and the inimitable Willis Eschenbach, whose fascinating contributions to this column should surely be collected and published as a best-seller, point out that I am treating feedbacks as linear when some of them are non-linear. For the math underlying non-linear feedbacks, which would have been too lengthy to include in my posting, see e.g. Roe (2009). Roe’s teacher was Dick Lindzen, who is justifiably proud of him. However, for the purpose of the present argument, it matters not whether feedbacks are linear or non-linear: what matters is the sum total of feedbacks as they are in our own time, which is multiplied by the Planck parameter (of which more later) to yield the closed-loop gain whose upper bound was the focus of my posting. Of course I agree with Willis that the non-linearity of many feedbacks, not to mention that all or nearly all of them cannot be measured directly, makes solving the climate-sensitivity equation difficult. But, again, that is why I have tried the approach of examining a powerful theoretical constraint on the absolute magnitude of the feedback-sum. Since the loop gain in the climate object cannot exceed 0.1 (at maximum) without rendering the climate so prone to instability that runaway feedbacks that have not occurred in the past would be very likely to have occurred, the maximum feedback sum before mutual amplification cannot exceed 0.32: yet the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of the feedback sum is 2.81.
Roger Knights rightly takes me to task for a yob’s comma that should not have been present in my posting. I apologize. He also challenges my use of the word “species” for the various types of greenhouse gas: but the word “species” is regularly used by the eminent professors of climatology at whose feet I have sat.
R. de Haan cites an author whose opinion is that warming back-radiation returned from the atmosphere back to the surface and the idea that a cooler system can warm a warmer system are “unphysical concepts”. I know that the manufacturers of some infra-red detectors say the detectors do not measure back-radiation but something else: however, both Mr. de Haan’s points are based on a common misconception about what the admittedly badly-named “greenhouse effect” is. The brilliant Chris Essex explains it thus: when outgoing radiation in the right wavelengths of the near-infrared meets a molecule of a greenhouse gas such as CO2, it sets up a quantum resonance in the gas molecule, turning it into a miniature radiator. This beautifully clear analogy, when I recently used it in a presentation in New Zealand, won the support of two professors of climatology in the audience. The little radiators that the outgoing radiation turns on are not, of course, restricted only to radiating outwards to space. They radiate in all directions, including downwards – and that is before we take into account non-radiative transports such as subsidence and precipitation that bring some of that radiation down to Earth. So even the IPCC, for all its faults, is not (in this respect, at any rate) repealing the laws of thermodynamics by allowing a cooler system to warm a warmer system, which indeed would be an unphysical concept.
Gary Smith politely raised the question whether the apparently sharp ups and downs in the paleoclimate temperature indicated strongly-positive feedbacks. With respect, the answer is No, for two reasons. First, the graph I used was inevitably compressed: in fact, most of the temperature changes in that graph took place over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Secondly, it is the maximum variance either side of the long-run mean, not the superficially-apparent wildness of the variances within the mean, that establishes whether or not there is a constraint on the maximum net-positivity of temperature feedbacks.
Nick Stokes asked where the limiting value 0.1 for the closed-loop gain in the climate object came from. It is about an order of magnitude above the usual design limit for net-positive feedbacks in electronic circuits that are not intended to experience runaway feedbacks or to oscillate either side of the singularity in the feedback-amplification equation, which occurs where the loop gain is unity.
David Hoffer wondered what evidence the IPCC had for assuming a linear rise in global temperature over the 21st century given that the radiative forcing from CO2 increases only at a logarithmic (i.e. sub-linear) rate. The IPCC pretends that all six of its “emissions scenarios” are to be given equal weight, but its own preference for the A2 scenario is clear, particularly in the relevant chapter of its 2007 report (ch. 10). See, in particular, fig. 10.26, which shows an exponential rise in both CO2 and temperature, when one might have expected the logarithmicity of the CO2 increase to cancel the exponentiality of the temperature increase. However, on the A2 scenario it is only the anthropogenic fraction of the CO2 concentration that is increased exponentially, and this has the paradoxical effect of making temperature rise near-exponentially too – but only if one assumes the very high climate sensitivity that is impossible given the fundamental constraint on the net-positivity of temperature feedbacks.
DR asks whether anyone has ever actually replicated experimentally the greenhouse effect mentioned by Arrhenius, who in 1895/6 first calculated how much warming a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause. Yes, the greenhouse effect was first demonstrated empirically by John Tyndale at the Royal Institution, London (just round the corner from my club) as far back as 1859. His apparatus can still be seen there. The experiment is quite easily replicated, so we know (even if the SB equation and the existence of a readily-measurable temperature lapse-rate with altitude did not tell us) that the greenhouse effect is real. The real debate is not on whether there is a greenhouse effect (there is), but on how much warming our rather small perturbation of the atmosphere with additional concentrations of greenhouse gases will cause (not a lot).
Werner Brozek asks whether the quite small variations in global surface temperature either side of the billion-year mean indicate that “tipping-points” do not exist. In mathematics and physics the term “tipping-point” is really only used by those wanting to make a political point, usually from a climate-extremist position. The old mathematical term of art, still used by many, was “phase-transition”: now we should usually talk of a “bifurcation” in the evolution of the object under consideration. Since the climate object is mathematically-chaotic (IPCC, 2001, para. 14.2.2.2; Giorgi, 2005; Lorenz, 1963), bifurcations will of course occur: indeed any sufficiently rare extreme-weather event may be a bifurcation. We know that very extreme things can suddenly happen in the climate. For instance, at the end of the Younger Dryas cooling period that brought the last Ice Age to an end, temperatures in Antarctica as inferred from variations in the ratios of different isotopes of oxygen in air trapped in layers under the ice, rose by 5 K (9 F) in just three years. “Now, that,” as Ian Plimer likes to say in his lectures, “is climate change!”
But the idea that our very small perturbation in temperature will somehow cause more bifurcations is not warranted by the underlying mathematics of chaos theory. In my own lectures I often illustrate this with a spectacular picture drawn on the Argand plane by a very simple chaotic function, the Mandelbrot fractal function. The starting and ending values for the pixels at top right and bottom left respectively are identical to 12 digits of precision; yet the digits beyond 12 are enough to produce multiple highly-visible bifurcations.
And we know that some forms of extreme weather are likely to become rarer if the world warms. Much – though not all – extreme weather depends not upon absolute temperature but upon differentials in temperature between one altitude or latitude and another. These differentials tend to get smaller as the world warms, so that outside the tropics (and arguably in the tropics too) there will probably be fewer storms.
Roy Clark says there is no such thing as equilibrium in the climate. No, but that does not stop us from trying to do the sums on the assumption of the absence of any perturbation (the equilibrium assumption). Like the square root of -1, it doesn’t really exist, but it is useful to pretend ad argumentum that it might.
Legatus raised a fascinating point about the measurements of ambient radiation that observatories around the world make so that they can calibrate their delicate, heat-sensitive telescopes. He says those measurements show no increase in radiation at the surface (or, rather, on the mountain-tops where most of the telescopes are). However, it is not the surface radiation but the radiation at the top of the atmosphere (or, rather, at the characteristic-emission altitude about 5 km above sea level) that is relevant: and that is 239.4 Watts (no relation) per square meter, by definition, because the characteristic-emission altitude (the outstanding Dick Lindzen’s name for it) is that altitude at which outgoing and incoming fluxes of radiation balance. It is also at that altitude, one optical depth down into the atmosphere, that satellites “see” the radiation coming up into space from the Earth/atmosphere system. Now, as we add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and cause warming, that altitude will rise a little; and, because the atmosphere contains greenhouse gases and, therefore, its temperature is not uniform, consequent maintenance of the temperature lapse-rate of about 6.5 K/km of altitude will ensure that the surface warms as a result. Since the altitude of the characteristic-emission level varies by day and by night, by latitude, etc., it is impossible to measure directly how it has changed or even where it is.
Of course, it is at the characteristic-emission altitude, and not – repeat not – at the Earth’s surface that the Planck parameter should be derived. So let me do just that. Incoming radiation is, say, 1368 Watts per square meter. However, the Earth presents itself to that radiation as a disk but is actually a sphere, so we divide the radiation by 4 to allow for the ratio of the surface areas of disk and sphere. That gives 342 Watts per square meter. However, 30% of the Sun’s radiation is reflected harmlessly back to space by clouds, snow, sparkling sea surfaces, my lovely wife’s smile, etc., so the flux of relevant radiation at the characteristic-emission altitude is 342(1 – 0.3) = 239.4 Watts per square meter.
From this value, we can calculate the Earth’s characteristic-emission temperature directly without even having to measure it (which is just as well, because measuring even surface temperature is problematic). We use the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, the only equation to be named after a Slovene. Stefan found the equation by empirical methods and, a decade or so later, his Austrian pupil Ludwig Boltzmann proved it theoretically by reference to Planck’s blackbody law (hence the name “Planck parameter”, engagingly mis-spelled “plank” by one blogger.
The equation says that radiative flux is equal to the emissivity of the characteristic-emission surface (which we can take as unity without much error when thinking about long-wave radiation), times the Stefan-Boltzmann constant 5.67 x 10^–8 Watts per square meter per Kelvin to the fourth power, times temperature in Kelvin to the fourth power. So characteristic-emission temperature is equal to the flux divided by the emissivity and by the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, all to the power 1/4.: thus, [239.4 / (1 x 5.67 x 10^–8)]^¼ = 254.9 K or thereby.
Any mathematician taking a glance at this equation will at once notice that one needs quite a large change in radiative flux to achieve a very small change in temperature. To find out how small, one takes the first differential of the equation, which (assuming emissivity to be constant) is simply the temperature divided by four times the flux: so, 254.9 / (4 x 239.4) = 0.2662 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. However, the IPCC (2007, p. 631, footnote) takes 0.3125 and, in its usual exasperating way, without explaining why. So a couple of weeks ago I asked Roy Spencer and John Christy for 30 years of latitudinally-distributed surface temperature data and spent a weekend calculating the Planck parameter at the characteristic-emission altitude for each of 67 zones of latitude, allowing for latitudinal variations in insolation and adjusting for variations in the surface areas of the zones. My answer, based on the equinoxes and admittedly ignoring seasonal variations in the zenith angles of the Sun at each latitude, was 0.316. So I’ve checked, and the IPCC has the Planck parameter right. Therefore, it is of course the IPCC’s value that I used in my calculations in my commentary for Remote Sensing, except in one place.
Kiehl & Trenberth (1997) publish a celebrated Earth/atmosphere energy-budget diagram in which they show 390 Watts per square meter of outgoing radiative flux from the surface, and state that this is the “blackbody” value. From this, we know that – contrary to the intriguing suggestion made by Legatus that one should simply measure it – they did not attempt to find this value by measurement. Instead, they were taking surface emissivity as unity (for that is what defines a blackbody), and calculating the outgoing flux using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. The surface temperature, which we can measure (albeit with some uncertainty) is 288 K. So, in effect, Kiehl and Trenberth are saying that they used the SB equation at the Earth’s surface to determine the outgoing surface flux, thus: 1 x 5.67 x 10^–8 x 288^4 = 390.1 Watts per square meter.
Two problems with this. First, the equation holds good only at the characteristic-emission altitude, and not at the surface. That is why, once I had satisfied myself that the IPCC’s value at that altitude was correct, I said in my commentary for Remote Sensing that the IPCC’s value was correct, and I am surprised to find that a blogger had tried to leave her readers with a quite different impression even after I had clarified this specific point to her.
Secondly, since Kiehl and Trenberth are using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation at the surface in order to obtain their imagined (and perhaps imaginary) outgoing flux of 390 Watts per square meter, it is of course legitimate to take the surface differential of the equation that they themselves imply that they had used, for in that we we can determine the implicit Planck parameter in their diagram. This is simply done: 288 / (4 x 390) = 0.1846 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. Strictly speaking, one should also add the non-radiative transports of 78 Watts per square meter for evapo-transpiration and 24 for thermal convection (see Kimoto, 2009, for a discussion) to the 390 Watts per square meter of radiative flux, reducing Kiehl and Trenberth’s implicit Planck parameter from 0.18 to 0.15. Either 0.15 or 0.18 gives a climate sensitivity ~1 K. So the Planck parameter I derived at this point in my commentary, of course, not the correct one: nor is it “Monckton’s” Planck parameter, and the blogger who said it was had been plainly told all that I have told you, though in a rather more compressed form because she had indicated she was familiar with differential calculus. It is not Monckton’s Planck parameter, nor even Planck’s Planck parameter, and it is certainly not a plank parameter – but it is Kiehl & Trenberth’s Planck parameter. If they were right (and, of course, I was explicit in using the conditional in my commentary to indicate, in the politest possible way, that they were not), then, like it or not, they were implying a climate sensitivity a great deal lower than they had perhaps realized – in fact a sensitivity of around 1 K. I do regret that a quite unnecessary mountain has been made out of this surely simple little molehill – just one of more than a dozen points in a wide-ranging commentary.
And just to confirm that it should really have been obvious to everyone that the IPCC’s value of the Planck parameter is my value, I gave that value as the correct one both in my commentary and in my recent blog posting on the fundamental constraint on feedback loop gain. You will find it, with its derivation, right at the beginning of that posting, and encapsulated in Eq. (3).
Thank you all again for your interest. This discussion has generally been on a far higher plane than is usual with climate discussions. I hope that these further points in answer to commentators will be helpful.
The cornerstone of the AGW cult is its belief that increasing cloud levels (caused by increasing levels of evaporation in response to the rising temperatures “caused” by rising levels of CO2) result in a strong positive feedback which magnifies (by a factor of ~3) the actual rise in temperature caused by rising CO2 levels.
If this is not true – and increasingly it looks like cloud feedback is negative – then there is no need for the IPCC, the Team, the great Bore and most ‘climate scientists’ to exist.
Forget the maths and the science, they are irrelevant here as cloud feedback has to be positive for one very simple reason: it cannot be negative or all those ‘decent, honest, climate scientists’ will lose their comfortable jobs and huge grant funding. Few people seem to realise how conflicted ‘climate scientists’ are: to maintain their very existence (just like leaders of weird religious cults), they have to scare the faithful (the chosen ones who believe) into funding their comfortable lifestyles. The facts are irrelevant, the only thing which matters is the ability to scare sufficiently.
In its next fantasy report, the IPCC will undoubtedly be very shrill in its confirmation that cloud feedback is very positive and “much worse than we thought”. No discussion to the contrary will be allowed, as “the science is settled.”
I think it is reasonable to assume the IPCC has not approached either Christopher Moncton or Anthony for contributions to their next report – “after all, we can’t have laymen making a mockery of our ‘science'”.
If Monckton ruled the world. it would cease to be the world – it would be a mathematical heaven. Surely what a creator might have desired, if we were to accept his existence! [Or not] !
Some papers on the Neoproterozoic glaciation:
http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/~peltier/pubs_highestimpact/T.J.%20Crowley,%20W.T.%20Hyde%20and%20W.R.%20Peltier,%20CO2%20levels%20required%20for%20deglaciation%20of%20a%20near%20snowball%20Earth,Geophys.%20Res.%20Lettt.%2028,%20283-286,%202001.pdf
http://www.princeton.edu/geosciences/people/maloof/pdf/SwansonHysell2010a.pdf
http://www.brynmawr.edu/geology/snowball/Snowball_Readings/Snowball_Causes/*SchragEtAl2002GGG.pdf
One of these suggests a maximum CO2 elevation of ~13%. However, that difference aside, I think an interesting point is that a “snowball earth” would completely seize-up the carbon cycle, very effectively blocking the oceans’ ability to absorb CO2 or its ability to participate in weathering reactions. The general picture is that in such circumstances it would build up – primarily via occasional volcanic eruptions punching up through the ice – until after a very long time it could force deglaciation even with solar output ~7% less than that of the present day.
Prior to the “snowball”, there were no ice-ages for ~1.5 billion years – an abnormally long period. Land surfaces would be completely leached down to quite a depth in such a period of weathering. A “good scraping” by the ice-sheets would have provided lots of fresh material – including unstable Ca and Mg-bearing minerals – for weathering agents to start work on. As I said in the post on the other thread, the dolomites are interglacial sediments, which makes sense when the above is thought through.
Another point I’d like to question you about is within the original sentence that Doug picked up on: specifically it is that if you had “mile-high glaciers” all over the planet, how could the atmospheric partial pressure of CO2 have any effect whatsoever on sedimentary precipitation processes going on underwater in the sea? The ice would separate the two systems as effectively as any barrier I can conceive of.
Regards – John
Thank you Chistopher Monckton for this lucid explanation that a layman like myself can almost follow. By that I mean I feel there is a good chance that I will be able to understand much more when I read it a few more times.
Apologies Christopher.. (exit left with hanging head).
“The brilliant Chris Essex explains it thus: when outgoing radiation in the right wavelengths of the near-infrared meets a molecule of a greenhouse gas such as CO2, it sets up a quantum resonance in the gas molecule, turning it into a miniature radiator.[…] So even the IPCC, for all its faults, is not (in this respect, at any rate) repealing the laws of thermodynamics by allowing a cooler system to warm a warmer system, which indeed would be an unphysical concept.”
Which doesn’t stop IPCC scientists like Dessler from constantly repeating the words “heat-trapping gases”, and having the journalists constantly repeat that phrase without ever writing in to the newspapers requiring a more scientifically correct description – how about “IR-redistributing gases”. IPCC science always intentionally borders on deception. That’s the politest way I can express it.
Christopher, I understand reading Hermann Harde’s paper (in German via translation software) that the latest version of the HITRAN database suggests a much smaller level of CO2 forcing closer to 0.45C rather than the 1C from the previous (1998?) HITRAN database.
I understand the reason for this is that the latest database uses a finer resolution for its line by line comparison of the absorption/emission of trace gases like CO2.
Does this mean you are wrong? And that it should be 1 over 2K or not 2K.
And, well done on the feedback analysis. Did you put a figure on the delay time for loop gain (i.e. the time it should take for any feedbacks to themselves result in output which is then fed back).
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley says:
“The equation says that radiative flux is equal to the emissivity of the characteristic-emission surface (which we can take as unity without much error when thinking about long-wave radiation), times the Stefan-Boltzmann constant 5.67 x 10^–8 Watts per square meter per Kelvin to the fourth power, times temperature in Kelvin to the fourth power.”
Sir, this is one of the problems I have with the CO2 warming the surface arguement. I have never seen a radiative heat transfer equation that accounts for H2O and CO2 mixture per Hottel’s charts. If I have read the charts correctly the emissivity of the mixuture is far less than unity. Thus CO2 would have to have a high temperature to impart heat back to the earth.
Thanks for putting this into terms that people can start to understand. I really appreciate it.
In your reply to Legatus, you state that various entities reflect back the incoming sunlight and you imply that your wife’s smile increases this reflection. Does this imply then that IF all husbands would keep their wives happy that the amount of reflection would increase and hence help to combat global warming? If this is correct is the converse also true in that men who make their wives unhappy are contributing to global warming?
Dosen’t water vapour absorb and reradiate energy like CO2?
If it does then the effect of CO2 is insignificant comparedd to that of water vapour.
Satellite systems are susceptible to rain fading that depends on the size of raindrops.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, many thanks for illustrating so clearly that, in spite its extreme complexity, the chaotic climate system is nevertheless governed by fixed rules and what some of those are and, moreover, that the scientists who have become the servants of the governments who stand to gain the most with the least investment not only fail to understand those rules but even attempt to invent new rules by which the governments can effectively rule, exploit and even destroy us and our economies.
the way i see it, the resonance in the gas molecule is setup by the absorption of the IR, the molecule will emit IR in its own spectrum. the planck curve emitted by the molecule in this case will of course be lesser due to the temperature of the molecule being lesser than the surface temperature. IR (photons) travel at the speed of light, so time is not a factor between one body transmitting and the other receiving. the water vapour or co2 molecule transmitting to the black body surface already pouring out photons of exactly the same frequency, but fewer, will mean nothing to the surface. it will however make a difference to the atmosphere between the two (there will be more chance of collision), and above (there will be fewer).
The only reason for all the money and “prestige/status” attempt that has fallen in to the hands of climate science is one very simple reason only.
The politically etablished UN climate convention (UNFCCC/UNEP).
First the UNFCCC was push etablished by politicians(UNEP). The UNFCCC(UNEP) states that we have human made global warming and that it will go to hell in 100 years. And to prevent that from happening we all have to go back to a leftist plan society.
And the last 20 years they have used lots of billions of USD to scientifically prove the UNFCCC.
But so far no cigar.
DirkH says:
“IPCC science always intentionally borders on deception.”
That is what originally initiated my skepticism in (C)AGW way back in 1994, I haven’t observed any change in this behavior between then and now.
Thank you, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, for taking the time to reply to these comments.
Ta.
A question for Peter Miller: Is there any indication that historically, there has been an increase in cloud cover? If there hasn’t been, doesn’t that pretty well put a nail in the agw coffin?
Well done again.
About equilibrium. Each day the sun rises (so to speak) over each slice of longitude, warms it for a time, and then lets it cool again at night (excepting for now the long nights of the poles.) If temperature rises from 65F to 95F, as in the American Midwest in the summer time, that is only a 6% swing, compared to the spatio-temporal average of 288K frequently cited. It is approximately a 13% swing in T^4. These are not large deviations from equilibrium, compared to huge differences among Venus, Earth and Mars, but they are very large compared to the slight (~1%) change from baseline proposed by IPCC as the effect of doubling CO2 concentration. I expect that real precision in estimating the “climate sensitivity” will require serious consideration of the non-equilibrated nature of Earth climate, and will require serious consideration of the non-linearities in the feedbacks.
Thank you again, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley. You are definitely on the right track, and I admire you even more for addressing the critiques raised here. Note, mine is not a critique: it’s the common refrain “More research is needed”!
Now, why the dig at the square root of -1? Naming aside, it is as real as the square root of 2. Only the positive integers are “real” — all the rest were invented by mathematicians: negatives, rationals, irrationals, complex, 0.
Christopher, thanks as always for your responses and your ideas. Inter a lot of interesting alia, you say:
I fear I have not been clear. I am not saying that the issue is whether the feedback is non-linear.
The issue is that the climate sensitivity, the very thing that you are looking to measure, is not just non-linear. It is also inversely proportional to temperature. By this I mean that the warmer the system gets, the harder it is to drive the surface temperature one degree warmer.
This is the result of a number of factors acting in concert in various combination as the surface warms. In no particular order, some of the major factors are:
1. Radiation goes up by the fourth power of temperature.
2. Evaporation goes up geometrically by the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship.
3. The surface circulation changes from random and stratified to cumulus-based circulation.
4. The increased wind from the new circulation pattern raises the evaporation linearly.
5. The surface circulation changes to a thunderstorm based pattern, increasing the wind.
6. The again-increased wind from the thunderstorms raises the evaporation linearly.
7. Thunderstorms bring cool water and air down from the lower troposphere and mix them violently with the surface air and water.
8. Clouds turn down the incoming solar radiation by hundreds of watts per square metre.
As a result of these and other phenomena, all of which increase as the surface temperature increases, it is almost impossible to drive the system to a level that is a whole lot higher than the current temperature. We are constantly running as hot as the system is capable of running, hard up against the stops.
In other words, the feedback is neither positive nor is it negative. Instead, the feedback varies inversely with the temperature in a threshold-based pattern. This is a characteristic of a system with a governor, a homeostatic system. When it is cold the governor warms the system up, and when it is warm the governor cools the system down.
To recap:
1. Your analysis is certainly valid, and is a fascinating way to look at the system. I agree that, given meteors and Deccan Traps and the like, IF the climate worked like the IPCC says and IF the average feedback were generally positive, it could not be more than about + 0.1. The IPCC claims it is much larger.
2. However, the idea of “average feedback” conceals the fact that the climate sensitivity is a non-linear function of temperature which we can represent as nf(T). So let’s go back through your math. You start with:
ΔT = ΔF λ
where ∆T is change in temperature, ∆F is change in forcing, and λ (lambda) is climate sensitivity.
However, lambda is a non-linear function of T, so the equation should be.
ΔT = ΔF nf(T)
Since nf(T) varies inversely with T, the hotter it gets, the less each additional watt of forcing changes the temperature.
This is a great system, because it is inherently stable. When temperatures are low, climate sensitivity is high, and the system warms rapidly. When temperatures are high, climate sensitivity is low, so it hardly warms at all.
However, because of this inherent stability, the climate system is not amenable to the type of analysis you are using. You are doing a “how much would it take to drive the system to instablility” analysis … but you are not taking into account that this is an inherently stable system.
In other words, you are correct that IF feedback is constant, and IF it is positive, it can’t be more than about +0.1 or the system would be unstable.
But we’re not looking at an electronic amplifier here, with constant feedback. In a system where sensitivity is inversely proportional to temperature, it is almost impossible to make the the system unstable.
These misunderstandings are due to the use of averages. Yes, we can determine some kind of global average feedback. But the fact we can average it does not make it a constant. It is temperature dependent, and varies non-linearly.
Finally, none of this diminishes your argument. Your argument is that, if the climate works the way the current climate science paradigm of the IPCC says, then the IPCC results are internally inconsistent.
My response is that you are 100% correct … but the climate doesn’t work the way the current paradigm says.
Thanks for continuing the discussion,
w.
The last couple weeks have been an interesting time in the Great Climate Boxing Match of 2011. *In one corner we had Mr. Gore and Mr. Nye and and a vast assortment of ex beauty contest contestants and other semi-celebrities aided and abetted by various cookie jars, $2 thermometers, and video editing equipment doing their best Chicken Little impression to convince us that if we don’t all do as we’re told we will all die horrible deaths. In the other corner we had an ex TV weatherman, a cartoonist with a bear named Theo, and Monckton of Brenchley.
Despite being vastly outnumbered the result was entirely predictable. It was like Mike Tyson in his prime against PeeWee Herman. TKO at 10 seconds of the first round.
The noble lord. You would always prefer to have him in your tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.
As a matter of interest,I was born near Brenchley Gardens in SE London. Is there any connection?
Oso Politico, as you might imagine the fossil record on clouds is a bit thin.
However, I am sure you can find someone from the IPCC who can give you a firm opinion on this in support their ‘science’.
Thank you, Christopher Monckton. And thank you, Willis Eschenbach. Your are two of the best, if not the best, communicators on climate science on the Web. That is as much due to your skills with the English language as to your understanding of the science.
Peter Miller says: @ September 29, 2011 at 11:14 am
Oso Politico, as you might imagine the fossil record on clouds is a bit thin.
However, I am sure you can find someone from the IPCC who can give you a firm opinion on this in support their ‘science’.
_____________________________________________________________________
Of Course they can all they have to do is consult Dr. Mann and his favorite tree.
Lord Monckton, Thank you for a clear explanation that those of us who are “math challenged” can at least attempt to follow. As you noted the caliber of commenter here at WUWT is quite high so the discussions are fascinating. A parent could do their children a great favor by pointing them in this direction to read articles such as yours especially given the dreck that now passes as science in the US school systems.
Willis Eschenbach says:
September 29, 2011 at 11:01 am
The issue is that the climate sensitivity, the very thing that you are looking to measure, is not just non-linear. It is also inversely proportional to temperature. By this I mean that the warmer the system gets, the harder it is to drive the surface temperature one degree warmer.
lambda is a non-linear function of T, so the equation should be.
ΔT = ΔF nf(T)
Since nf(T) varies inversely with T, the hotter it gets, the less each additional watt of forcing changes the temperature.
——————————————-
I agree fully with Willis here and note that this is a very important point that is never addressed and the IPCC actually ignores it.
Here is a good example of why it shouldn’t be ignored. The Sun’s surface varies by +/- 100,000 W/m2 over the solar cycle (just to repeat, now we are talking about a range of 200,000 W/m2 over just 5.5 years). Yet the Sun’s surface temperature only changes by +/- 0.5C over that cycle. And we cannot even find the solar cycle impact in our temperature records. Somehow, here on Earth, 3.7 W/m2 produces 1.0C but on the Sun 200,000 Watts is needed to produce 1.0C.
Technically, the Earth’s surface needs to add +16.5 W/m2 to increase its surface temperature by 3.0C. The IPCC says we only need 6 W/m2 to get there because they live in a linear world.
Michael Larkin says:
September 29, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Thank you, Christopher Monckton. And thank you, Willis Eschenbach. Your are two of the best, if not the best, communicators on climate science on the Web. That is as much due to your skills with the English language as to your understanding of the science.
That definitely bears repeating. I think you have more than adequately addressed the blogger’s points, thank you. These last few weeks, probably since the Dessler brouhaha, have been fascinating. I have never seen such an outpouring of mathematics as there has been lately.
/paul
Posted on September 29, 2011 By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
However, it is not the surface radiation but the radiation at the top of the atmosphere (or, rather, at the characteristic-emission altitude about 5 km above sea level) that is relevant:
Perhaps that is, indeed relevant in terms of global warming, however, global warming is not a problem if it only involves warming at 5km above sea level. We are, instead, supposed to be worried about, and preventing, CATASTROPIC global warming, or CAGW. If the warming is not catastrophic, there is no need for us to control “greenhouse gasses”, as they will produce no harmful effects. We then look at the supposed catastrophic effects of global warming, are they said to take place only at 5k altitude? The only ones that I see as possibly warranting the term “catastrophic”, such as the ice melting and the sea rising, or species extinction, take place at ground level (with the exception of some mountain glaciers perhaps, but I suspect that the amount of ice at the poles dwarfs the ice in such glaciers). In addition, the runaway effect from warming of the sea followed by increased evaporation and more of the greenhouse gas water vapor from this increase in infrared radiation must, obviously, take place at sea level (or below). Therefore, while we may say that AGW takes place at 5k altitude, the only thing we have to be concerned about, CAGW, takes place at ground/sea level. This is true unless it can be shown that catastrophe will occur when there is significantly more infrared at 5k altitude but NOT more infrared at sea level. I do not believe that this is even possible, if there is more infrared at 5km, there must also be more infrared at sea level, if there is not more infrared at sea level, the chance of there being significantly more at 5km altitude is essentially none, or so small an increase as to not be worth worrying about or taking drastic action to control.
Considering that the actual catastrophic effects that necessitate us to do something drastic to prevent it are chiefly or entirely effects of increased infrared at sea level, it is that which we must measure, and which we can measure (so why haven’t we??). If there is no more infrared at sea level (and posts made here state that over 35 years there is not) despite increasing CO2, then, since these catastrophic effects are sea level effects, it does not matter to us what is going on at 5km altitude, we are suffering no catastrophe down here, and thus need not be concerned by increasing CO2.
To sum up:
The sole harmful or catastrophic effect of increased CO2 is said to be increased infrared.
These harmful effects are said to take place chiefly at ground/sea level.
We have measured an increase of CO2.
We can measure the increase of infrared at ground/sea level, which is where we are concerned about.
The current limited information I have is that at ground/sea level, and at altitude (at observatories, usually placed on a height), there is no more infrared than there was formerly at anywhere from 25 to 35 years ago, when there was less CO2.
Conclusion, an increase of CO2 does not cause more infrared at ground level where it is said to be catastrophic, therefore, there is no need to control CO2.
Second conclusion, we need to make a careful study of the amount of infrared over time at various altitudes, at various places, and over as long a time period as possible. So far, I have seen two posters on this site who work with infrared detection gear, and they have reported no increase. However, we need DATA, we need an actual wide ranging study with careful controls, we, in short, need to use the scientific method, rather than rely on the word of two posters to this site. The instruments have been around for some time, at least 35 years, surely someone has kept records of what they have detected with those instruments. If we do not at least attempt to make direct measurements of this, the central idea underlying all of CAGW, what are we really doing, is it science? Without direct measurements, all our theories and equations are just fiction, and resemble this:
Milk production at a dairy farm was low so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the farmer received the write-up, and opened it to read on the first line: “Consider a spherical cow in vacuum. . . .”
Still, even though neither you nor anyone else I know of have yet sought data on the central, underlying idea that is said to make CO2 so catastrophic, you have done two things. First, you have shown that, if we take the IPCC at their word, the amount of warming they claim will happen seems to be impossible using their figures and current knowledge. Basically, you have shown that their logic is not nternally self consistant.
Second, you have solved catastrophic global warming, as seen here “However, 30% of the Sun’s radiation is reflected harmlessly back to space by… my lovely wife’s smile”. Soooo, we know what to do to prevent this horrible catastrophe, right?
Nick Stokes asked where the limiting value 0.1 for the closed-loop gain in the climate object came from. It is about an order of magnitude above the usual design limit for net-positive feedbacks in electronic circuits that are not intended to experience runaway feedbacks or to oscillate either side of the singularity in the feedback-amplification equation, which occurs where the loop gain is unity.
Just because that’s a value that a prudent electrical engineer might use in designing a circuit, gives no justification for the assumption that it is the limiting value on earth. As mentioned by others the phase relations are also important in a complex system such as the Earth, a circuit like a Wien oscillator where the positive feedback lags the negative would be more appropriate.
The surface temperature, which we can measure (albeit with some uncertainty) is 288 K. So, in effect, Kiehl and Trenberth are saying that they used the SB equation at the Earth’s surface to determine the outgoing surface flux, thus: 1 x 5.67 x 10^–8 x 288^4 = 390.1 Watts per square meter.
Two problems with this. First, the equation holds good only at the characteristic-emission altitude, and not at the surface.
Why do you assume that the S-B equation doesn’t hold good at the surface, and why do you think that non-radiative losses from the surface should be used to calculate the ‘Planck parameter’?
To Willis Eschenbach, – Many thanks for your distinguished contribution to this thread. You are quite right to point out that climate sensitivity is not likely to be a linear response, and also to discern that there is nevertheless a value in staying as close as possible in all respects to the IPCC’s modus operandi, in order to show that even if one does the sums the IPCC’s way we are not going to see much more than 1 K of manmade warming from CO2 emissions this century. The less we change in their methodology, the less they can come back to us and say they wouldn’t have done it that way.
They’re in galloping retreat because they know it ain’t happenin’, and we can run them off the field altogether if we continue to harry them with their own weapons, showing them with painful clarity that even if we do all the math their way it ain’t gonna happen.
And just wait till I get started in on the economics. Just waiting for a last piece of advice from a former member of the monetary policy committee of the Bank of England, and then I’ll be able to demonstrate very, very simply but very, very compelllingly, using the IPCC’s own methods along with those of the hapless Lord Stern, that the cost of trying to Save The Planet is around one or even two orders of magnitude greater than the cost of doing nothing now and adapting in a focused way later.
You may think the IPCC’s science makes very little sense, and you’re right: but the economics – as the Irish would put it – makes no sense at all at all.
“Nick Stokes asked where the limiting value 0.1 for the closed-loop gain in the climate object came from. It is about an order of magnitude above the usual design limit for net-positive feedbacks in electronic circuits that are not intended to experience runaway feedbacks or to oscillate either side of the singularity in the feedback-amplification equation, which occurs where the loop gain is unity.”
But this is the figure that governs the supposed limit on climate sensitivity in this argument. So the real world climate is held to be determined by a design safety limit used for designing electronic circuits? Plus an “order of magnitude”?
Here was your summary argument:
“If, however, the loop gain in the climate object is no greater than the theoretical maximum value g = 0.1, then, by Eq. (4), the corresponding overall feedback gain factor G is 1.11, and, by Eq. (1), climate sensitivity in response to a CO2 doubling cannot much exceed 1.2 K.”
It all depends on that “theoretical maximum value”. And that’s where it comes from?
Legatus says:
September 29, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Posted on September 29, 2011 By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
However, it is not the surface radiation but the radiation at the top of the atmosphere (or, rather, at the characteristic-emission altitude about 5 km above sea level) that is relevant:
Perhaps that is, indeed relevant in terms of global warming, however, global warming is not a problem if it only involves warming at 5km above sea level. We are, instead, supposed to be worried about, and preventing, CATASTROPIC global warming, or CAGW. If the warming is not catastrophic, there is no need for us to control “greenhouse gasses”, as they will produce no harmful effects. We then look at the supposed catastrophic effects of global warming, are they said to take place only at 5k altitude? The only ones that I see as possibly warranting the term “catastrophic”, such as the ice melting and the sea rising, or species extinction, take place at ground level (with the exception of some mountain glaciers perhaps, but I suspect that the amount of ice at the poles dwarfs the ice in such glaciers).
First the temperature at 5km above sea level is linked to the temperature at the surface via the lapse rate, if the temperature at 5km goes up so does that at the surface.
Secondly the ice which will flood us if it melts is at altitude. the mean altitude of the Greenland ice pack is ~ 2km, and the S Pole is on a plateau at an altitude of ~3km.
Willis Eschenbach says:
September 29, 2011 at 11:01 am
These misunderstandings are due to the use of averages. Yes, we can determine some kind of global average feedback. But the fact we can average it does not make it a constant. It is temperature dependent, and varies non-linearly.
Three things come to mind:
“The average American has one ball and one tit. You now know everything you need to know about statistics.” – from _Mr Natural’s Rules of Women and the Universe_, circa 1977
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better
experiment.” – Lord Ernest Rutherford
As Mark Twain famously wrote of that kind of extrapolation:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Stretch out your hand and I will place a silver dollar on it. Now suppose this silver dollar is magically connected to a heat pipe which couples the integrated temperature of all the CO2 in our atmosphere. Nice and warm? Nope. Frostbite? Yes, of course. Let’s call it GWF (Global Warming Frostbite).
To Nick Stokes, – Well, you’d have to do quite a bit of background reading to understand why the constraint on feedbacks in an electrical circuit is akin to the constraint on feedbacks in any other object on which they operate. The IPCC itself uses F.W. Bode’s 1945 tome on feedback amplification in electrical circuits as the justification for its use of the feedback approach. Unfortunately, the climate scientists who wrote that bit of the report were not experienced in the design of electronic circuitry, as David Evans most certainly is, so they had not grasped the significance of the theoretical upper limit of 0.01 on the feedback loop gain. Since process engineers sometimes take a risk and design circuitry with a loop gain up to (but never more than) an order of magnitude greater than this, I have of course taken the higher value to do the IPCC all the favors I can.
But the IPCC’s implicit loop-gain values – 0.4-0.8 – are simply way too high to be physically feasible in a climate that has exhibited such formidable temperature-stability for the best part of a billion years. They’re in the wrong ballpark altogether. Just look at my figure displaying the climate-sensitivity curve at various loop gains and you’ll see how absurdly close their values are to the point at which the equation gallops ever-more-steeply upward towards the singularity at a loop gain of 1.
So you could start by reading Bode, which is toughish going but comprehensive, and then move on to Roe (2009), who has a good discussion of the mathematical understanding of both linear and non-linear feedbacks. Then you need to talk to a process engineer: they know a lot more than climatologists do about the mathematics underlying feedbacks. You’ll get some idea of why this is so in the rather fascinating historical opening section of Roe’s paper.
Most climatologists wouldn’t even know what the loop gain in the climate system is. In fact it’s the product of the Planck parameter 0.3125 K/W/m2, discussed in these postings, and the simple sum of all unamplified feedbacks acting on the system (the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of the feedback-sum is 2.063). Multiplying the two gives the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of the loop gain 0.645, which is again absurdly high. Take this absurdity (which, if removed, constrains equilibrium climate sensitivity to little more than 1.2 K), note that this low climate sensitivity matches not only recent temperature trends but also several explicit and implicit climate sensitivities in the literature, and you will see where my admittedly rather telegraphic commentary is coming from. For further details, my longer paper explaining matters rather more fully is of course available.
Legatus says: “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better
experiment.” – Lord Ernest Rutherford
Rutherford inverted the proper time ordering. If your experiment needs statistics, use the results to design a better experiment.
Phil says: First the temperature at 5km above sea level is linked to the temperature at the surface via the lapse rate, if the temperature at 5km goes up so does that at the surface.
That’s the equilibrium case. With disequilibrium “forcings” provided daily by sunrise and sunset, cloud formation and precipitation, there may never be equilibrium. You could have the 5km and surface temperatures swing in opposite directions for a few hours (leading eventually to weeks and years), and the equilibrium assumption be wrong by only a few percent, yet useless for human planing.
Willis Eschenbach says:
September 29, 2011 at 11:01 am
Willis, you make eight great points about how climate sensitivity is inversely proportional to temperatures.
Is there any way we could get these phenomena into figures? Where would we start?
I’m sure the amount of data and number crunching would be huge, but could it be broken down and crowd-sourced?
It is such a compelling argument, and explains for me why we seem to go so quickly from glacial to interglacial and back, and yet why it is so relatively stable at either extreme. So if we could properly derive an overall climate sensitivity number (not the CO2 one, rather an indicator as to how quickly or forcefully the climate is reacting to events at a given time), would that give us any indication as to how far along the road we are in this interglacial? Does that make sense?
To expand on my point of the dolomitic rocks. I apologize for not being more clear about what diagenesis involves. Diagenetic dolomite is not formed at time of deposition; it is a mineralologic alteration which takes place sometimes long after deposition from reactions with circulating fluids within the rock.
The dolomitic rocks you refer to may well have been deposited with calcite or aragonite as the carbonate, in eqilibrium with a low CO2 atmosphere, and later altered to dolomite. The mere existence of dolomite tells us little about the atmosphere at time of deposition. Carbonate rocks are an amazingly open system throughout their geologic lives and without really detailed work their chemistry is a poor proxy for paleo- atmospheric makeup.
Just a minor point in your excellent article, but the only field in which I can contribute!
Here is why I believe we should look anew (actually, for the first time, as far as I know) at the central idea of CAGW, that increased CO2 will cause increased infrared, with all the effects said to follow.
“”Instead of applying observation to the things we wished to know, we have chosen rather to imagine them. Advancing from one ill founded supposition to another, we have at last bewildered ourselves amidst a multitude of errors….
…When matters have been brought this length, when errors have been thus accumulated, there is but one remedy by which order can be restored to the faculty of thinking; this is, to forget all that we have learned, to trace back our ideas to their source, to follow the train in which they rise, and, as my Lord Bacon says, to frame the human understanding anew.”” Lavoisier
We have chosen to imagine that increased CO2 causes CAGW. We have now been shown that there are major problems with this idea, as show by Christopher Monckton in the article above. That being the case, what, then, is the truth? Let us go back to the source of the idea. The source idea that underlies the whole theory is that increased CO2 results in increased infrared, all else follows AFTER that. However, we have NEVER applied observation to the thing we wished to know, we have never bothered to observe whether increased CO2 actually does result in increased infrared, not in a formal, wide ranging, scientific method using study.
Look at the history of the idea of CAGW, it started with an assumption by some guy 150 years ago, that increased CO2 would result in increased heat (only 1C) due to increased infrared. However, since then, has anyone bothered to actually check to see if there actually is increased infrared, to actually check if the original assumption is true by direct observation? We are looking at an idea exactly as described above “”Instead of applying observation to the things we wished to know, we have chosen rather to imagine them. Advancing from one ill founded supposition to another, we have at last bewildered ourselves amidst a multitude of errors”. Thus, the first thing we need to do is to point out to all and sundry that the basic assumption upon which all of this is based has never been directly observed, and from what I can see, has never even been attempted to be observed (odd that…). Having thus sown seeds of doubt in people’s minds, the next task is to do the observation ourselves, find and compile the data of infrared, and then present it, comparing the increase in CO2 to whatever increase or decrease or even lack of change of the infrared. If there is little or no rise in infrared when we know that there is rise of CO2 (as the limited data I now have suggests), we have then arrived at an idea which the great mass of people can use to replace the idea of CAGW which we have sown seeds of doubt about. After all, if we take away their old belief, we need to replace it with something.
Now, some of you may say “but they won’t listen”, well, for many, you may be right. Here is a very appropriate quote about that:
The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
Thus, we see that it may take some time for the herds, slowly, one by one, to come to their senses. However, it has to start somewhere, why not here, “…the world’s most viewed climate website”? The poll numbers have already shown that the seeds of doubt are wall sown, it is now time to go for the throat, to aim at the central idea upon which the whole edifice of CAGW rests, and kick it out from under them. The result will be that the CAGW supporters whose jobs and power base are threatened by this will take desperate measures, and can be caught out at it, and poked fun at (as in the video investigation done by Anthony Watts). Result ” “If you want any discipline to shape up, first get it laughed at.” – Paul Harvey, and “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem” Lincoln. However, I would suggest you get at it quickly, the proponents of CAGW have already gained considerable power, especially in government, and if they see their jobs threatened (as they are beginning to), they may remember what George Washington had to say “How soon we forget history … Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. and, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”. I can see a day, not very far off, when websites like this one are not allowed to exist. Make your hay while the sun shines.
Ok, here’s an analogy to make my point clear– picture a piece of silicate petrified wood. The original wood has been entirely replaced by silica but still looks like a log. It grew as a carbonaceous object, was buried, and slowly altered The chemical makeup of the silica tells us nothing of the atmosphere in which the tree grew. Such is the case with many dolomites. They reflect later alteration more than original depositional conditions.
While “1 K or not 1 K” is a question, it is not a scientific question. That the climate sensitivity is 1 K is a theory but it is not a scientific theory. Neither is the theory a scientific theory that the climate sensitivity has a value that is not 1 K.
The “climate sensitivity” is the increase in the equilibrium global surface air temperature from a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. The equilibrum temperature is not an observable feature of the real world and it follows that the theory in which the climate sensitivity has a particular value, e.g. 1 K, is not refutable by observation. The susceptibility of a theory to refutation by observation is, however, the mark of a theory that is “scientific” in nature.
Monckton’s claim that
is simply wrong because the analysis in Kimoto 2009 is flawed. It is the analysis in Kimoto that will result in computations of Planck parameters that are no more likely correct than values drawn out of a hat.
I have posted specific challenge questions for Monckton.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/monckton-in-your-own-words-explain-this/
The challenge questions are simple and should be readily answered by anyone who can understand the math and physical claims in the derivation of (18) in Kimoto. The flaws in this derivation were discussed in my previous post: Monckton has not addressed these flaws in any way whatsoever.
I would like Monckton, or anyone who thinks one can use equation (18) in Kimoto to compute Planck parameter– as Monckton has done to drop by and take the challenge. Those who know how to take derivatives and who took know how to solve very simple differential equations will quickly identify the assumptions in the derivation and come to recognize that the derivation of (18) has serious shortcomings.
The shortcomings cannot be overcome by ignoring them, writing “see Kimoto” or decreeing oneself correct.
I will be posting regarding other more nunaced issues touching on Moncktons claims in his current post at a later time.
*CO2 rose by 20% from 1950 to 2000 while temperature rose by 0.6 degrees. This probably underestimates equilibrium climate sensitivity because the effect is reduced by lags and increasing aerosols, but it still gives over 2 C per doubling as a sensitivity.
*The temperature rose 6-8 degrees coming out of the ice ages, which also indicates a high climate sensitivity (positive feedback) to albedo changes that can’t be explained by albedo alone.
*Paleoclimate shows 15 degree ranges for only 20-fold CO2 changes, consistent with sensitivities of 3-4 degrees per doubling.
Lucia,
Do you have to be so rude in addressing Christopher Monckton by his surname only? Especially on his own thread? If you try a little courtesy, perhaps he will respond to you, but I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t.
Agree with Michael Larkin, Lucia is not being polite [probably because of her forced climb-down over the emails]. But she should really address Lord/Viscount Monckton by his title in her comments. At least once per post. That goes for everyone else, too.
Christopher Monckton and Willis Eschenbach;
Thanks to both of you for summing up some tremendously complex matters in language that almost anyone ought to be able to follow. One knows that one is winning the debate when your detractors descend into outbursts regarding tiny details while refusing to engage the larger issues.
There’s one point that I’d like to add that I’ve found also leaves the warmists with little to say, and that is to expand upon the fact that P (watts/m2) varies directly not with T (in degrees K) but with T raised to the power of 4. This implies a natural NEGATIVE feedback in and of itself that I rarely see addressed at all. Every degree of warming raises the number of watts/m2 to result in the next degree of warming. But there is a much more important (in my opinion) point that comes out of that.
At -40 degrees C, an additional 3.7 w/m2 would result in about 0.5 degrees of warming. At +40 degrees C, an additional 3.7 w/m2 would result in about 1.4 degrees of warming. The notion that the earth would warm 1 degree (or 1.1 or 1.9 or 6.8 or 0.0002 or whatever the actual number is) is a fallacy in and of itself. There is no such thing as an “average” increase in the earth’s temperature that is uniform.
Most of any actual warming would be at the lowest temperatures (where the biosphere gains the most benefit from both increased CO2 AND increased temperatures) and very little warming would occur at peak temperatures during the day (by comparison). So, the bulk of any warming would be at night time lows, at high latitudes, in winter. Day time highs in summer in low latitudes would change very little. The polar bears get to sleep through -36 instead of -40 and the palm trees must suffer day time highs of +38.5 instead of +38.0 to wind up with an “average” of plus one degree.
Ooooh…I’m scared.
Smokey says:
September 29, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Agree with Michael Larkin, Lucia is not being polite [probably because of her forced climb-down over the emails]. But she should really address Lord/Viscount Monckton by his title in her comments. At least once per post. That goes for everyone else, too.>>>
I’ve expressed my respect to Christopher Monckton which he has resoundingly earned. I see no need to refer to him according to an inherited title. Respect is earned, not demanded, that is what democracy is all about.
Lucia on the other hand has descended into minutia. As the saying goes, when you don’t know what you are doing, do it in excrutiating detail.
In reply to R. de Hann, Lord Monckton says, “when outgoing radiation in the right wavelengths of the near-infrared meets a molecule of a greenhouse gas such as CO2, it sets up a quantum resonance in the gas molecule, turning it into a miniature radiator. This beautifully clear analogy, when I recently used it in a presentation in New Zealand, won the support of two professors of climatology in the audience. The little radiators that the outgoing radiation turns on are not, of course, restricted only to radiating outwards to space. They radiate in all directions, including downwards – and that is before we take into account non-radiative transports such as subsidence and precipitation that bring some of that radiation down to Earth.”
Here’s another beautifully clear analogy that comes to the opposite inference:
The little radiators stuck to my microprocessor chip, otherwise known as a heat sink, both radiate and conduct heat from the hotter body to the colder in accordance with the 2nd Law. In a statistical sense is there ‘back-conduction’? Yes, but it is negligible. Is there ‘back-radiation’ from the heat sink to the microprocessor? Yes, but it does not heat the microprocessor because cold cannot heat hot. Now, what happens when I add more radiators [analogous to adding more GHGs] by putting a bigger heat sink on my microprocessor? The cooling rate INCREASES.
However, according to AGW proponents increasing the radiative surface area [such as with a bigger heat sink or adding more GHG radiators to the atmosphere] should DECREASE the rate of cooling.
Go figure
Smokey says:
September 29, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Agree with Michael Larkin, Lucia is not being polite [probably because of her forced climb-down over the emails]. But she should really address Lord/Viscount Monckton by his title in her comments. At least once per post. That goes for everyone else, too.
==============================
I caught that too, Smokey, and I agree with you 100%.
Lucia is a real lady and a smart one at that light years ahead of her time.
But in this case….why not show a little normal protocol respect to someone else as opposed to using their last name as if this were some sort of American football locker room conversation where last names are used on purpose?
He’s a lord and a viscount for christsakes even if you don’t understand the protocol…at least give it try.
Cheers,
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
@ Christopher Monckton from Brenchley
Your wrote:
“R. de Haan cites an author whose opinion is that warming back-radiation returned from the atmosphere back to the surface and the idea that a cooler system can warm a warmer system are “unphysical concepts”. I know that the manufacturers of some infra-red detectors say the detectors do not measure back-radiation but something else: however, both Mr. de Haan’s points are based on a common misconception about what the admittedly badly-named “greenhouse effect” is. The brilliant Chris Essex explains it thus: when outgoing radiation in the right wavelengths of the near-infrared meets a molecule of a greenhouse gas such as CO2, it sets up a quantum resonance in the gas molecule, turning it into a miniature radiator. This beautifully clear analogy, when I recently used it in a presentation in New Zealand, won the support of two professors of climatology in the audience. The little radiators that the outgoing radiation turns on are not, of course, restricted only to radiating outwards to space. They radiate in all directions, including downwards – and that is before we take into account non-radiative transports such as subsidence and precipitation that bring some of that radiation down to Earth. So even the IPCC, for all its faults, is not (in this respect, at any rate) repealing the laws of thermodynamics by allowing a cooler system to warm a warmer system, which indeed would be an unphysical concept”.
My dear Christopher Moncktom from Brenchely,
I humbly disagree with your observation that my posting has been based on what you call a common misconception about what the admittedly badly-named “greenhouse effect” is.
May I invite you to have a read at the scientific publication by Professor Nasif Nahle.
Observations on “Backradiation” during Nighttime and Daytime
You can find the the publication here:
http://principia-scientific.org/publications/New_Concise_Experiment_on_Backradiation.pdf
I really would like to see your much appreciated response to his publication which includes a frontal attack on one of the basic equations used in the climate change discussion
P / 5.6704)^0.25 * 100 = K
The alternate equation makes the brilliant Chris Essex CO2 radiators even more irrelevant than they already are.
Also read:
“Do moths make a light bulb burn brighter” Derek Alker
http://noconsensus.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/derek-free-to-all-pdf-to-end-agw-scam-saturday-18_12-version.pdf
I am a great admirer of yours and I have followed all your recorded interviews, “climate fights” and publications over the past years. You’re truly one of our biggest Brothers in Arms and in my humble opinion the best debater of our times.
Thank you in advance for taking your precious time and trouble and thanks for all the work you have done fighting the consensus.
With the kindest regards,
Ron de Haan
He’s a lord and a viscount for christsakes even if you don’t understand the protocol…at least give it try.
Cheers,
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I know many Americans love those titles, thinking them quaint, but many of us who grow up with inherited privilege are less fond of it.
I would no more address him as “Lord” in an informal setting than I would put “PhD” after Michael Mann’s name.
There has never been any question over whether GHGs reradiate LW radiation or not. The uncertainty as far as I can see is whether it emits all of the energy or only a very small fraction (Nasif Nahle estimates 0.02). Also, as the radiation is emitted at a lower energy level, whether it can warm any other GHG molecules even when it is reradiated. I’ve also read that it’s a property of a black body (the earth) that it can’t absorb and reradiate or be heated by radiation at a lower energy level than that which itself has emitted which back radiation would be. I’d say that as the observed results don’t support it, the radiation model used by climate modellers is patently incorrect.
Great stuff, and I really like the idea of getting an upper bound on the sum of the feedbacks – the electrical oscillator is a model I can build that works every time, unlike Al Gore’s demo.
A small quibble – in SI, the abbreviation is capitalised when the name of the unit is a mark of respect for a contributor, but not when the name is used in full – so W is for watt, and Watt does not exist.
Sigh and frustration… You are so close yet at the same time so far off. As an engineer I find you scientist types so wrapped up in your measurements and following a line of reasoning (theory) so slavishly that you miss the forest from the trees. What perplexes me the most is you start off with Watts/meter^2 and then conflate this to temperature. Here is where the AGW people start their error and you follow in it. Temperature (F/C/K) IS NOT the measure of TOTAL HEAT (Q), Btu is (KJ). Temperature is only a partial (SENSIBLE) measure of HEAT, NOT the TOTAL measure of HEAT (Q). Temperature is only roughly a measure of proportional HEAT content. Watts/meter^2 is a TOTAL measure of heat coming from the sun, NOT a PARTIAL measure of HEAT. When you insist on measuring the response of the atmosphere in C or K to Watts/meter^2 you are comparing Apples to Oranges.
Humidity and Temperature combined determine the HEAT content of the air. Failure to do use the proper units will inevitably give you a false total. The only proper scientific/engineering means to measure the heat content of the air is via Specific Enthaply in Btu/# or Kj/kg. This is why the AGW people are perplexed as to where the missing heat is, they failed to measure all of it in the first place! They are so busy measuring the temperature difference that they fail to realize any change in humidity will alter the Total Heat content of the air far more randomly than any thermometer error. It is completely false to assume the humidity content of the air doesn’t change from year to year, in fact they have yet to document this variable one way or another. What’s worse they use monthly temperature averages throughout the year to come up with the yearly average. This is ridiculously wrong as humidity varies greatly from season to season. You can not conflate a summer temperature (high humidity) as roughly proportional in heat content to winter temperatures (low humidity). You can’t assume the humidity content from year to year will even out like thermometer error either since humidity is a prime variable in terms of Total Heat content. If you could assume that, then why can’t you assume temperature will even out over time? Hence you can’t have a trend if you expect a prime variable to even out and thus drop out from your equation. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. What we have here is the classic false proof, where the assumption at the outset of logical thought process is incorrect. In typical fashion you scientific types run with the flawed assumptions, apply flawless logic and then end up with a false conclusion.
Tell the AGW people they need to go back to the university and take Thermodynamics 101 over again! Here’s starter material for them: http://www.slideshare.net/physics101/001-thermodynamic-system
Smokey says:September 29, 2011 at 9:16 pm
quote
Agree with Michael Larkin, Lucia is not being polite
unquote
ITYM ‘Dr L. Liljegren’. Lord Monckton should, occasionally, acknowledge her as such.
It’s a shame lucia has a bee in her bonnet about Lord Monckton’s work — her posts look as if the very mention of his name brings on the red mists. On other subjects she is unequalled: her detailed breakdown of the pending failure of model predictions — like watching really exciting paint dry, or arctic ice failing to hit a new low, strangely compelling — should be read by everyone. Her posts on the current subject, while they may be justified, not so much.
JF
Lucia: I do appreciate that you are regarded highly by some of the commentators here but I do try to limit my daily reading to just a few websites that present arguments for and against this highly contentious issue. Would you be kind enough to bring your arguments here rather than directing us back to your own website? I too have websites but I would not presume on readers of my comments to go elsewhere to participate in a debate underway here.
On the issue of politeness I too have a title, hard earned over many years and now held as emeritus. You may reply to me as ‘Professor’, ‘Bob’ or, as many of my students elect to do ‘sir’ and I can happily accept either. If you call me ‘Ryan’ I will presume that you are simply being arrogant, dismiss your comments accordingly and look elsewhere for an intelligent contribution in this debate.
@dscott – You have certainly hit the nail on the head wrt one of the main weaknesses in current climate research – all that fussing about missing heat, when the issue is energy content. Another possible destination for incoming energy – it could be speeding up ocean circulation. We don’t know if it is, because the necessary detailed measurements aren’t made.
JF as you say: It’s a shame lucia has a bee in her bonnet about Lord Monckton’s work — her posts look as if the very mention of his name brings on the red mists.
Wonder if she realises that her posts on this thread have become tedious and boring; adding little of value to the debate.
It’s interesting to compare with Willis’ posts. Willis, whose writings are never tedious nor boring and who by now can be considered an authority of consequence in matters climatical, profoundly disagrees with Lord Monckton’s analysis. For someone who doesn’t pull his punches, Willis gets on rather well with the Lord; indeed there appears to be some mutual admiration. All very surprising.
I see that the blogger who seems perhaps unreasonably and unreasoningly eager to find fault with my work is still complaining that a peer-reviewed paper that I cited is wrong. If it is wrong enough to trouble her, then she should write a paper for the journal in which it appeared, setting the record straight.
The error lies not in anything I wrote but in the incorrect assumption by Kiehl and Trenberth that the Stefan-Boltzmann equation applies at the Earth’s surface. It doesn’t, though it did when there was no atmosphere. The blogger has still not explicitly acknowledged to her own readers that what the heading on her blog still calls the “Monckton Planck parameter” is in fact the implicit Kiehl & Trenberth Planck parameter. The value I use for the Planck parameter is the value the IPCC uses, because I had gone to considerable lengths to check that the IPCC had gotten it right.
If one were to see this matter in its proper perspective, therefore, one would be complaining not at me for pointing out Kiehl and Trenberth’s error and drawing logical and entirely correct conclusions from it, but at Kiehl and Trenberth for having made that error. It is their Planck parameter, not mine, that is wrong. And whether one excludes (as they appear to do) or includes (as Kimoto does) the non-radiative with the radiative transports from the surface in their incorrect surface application of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, the resultant equilibrium climate sensitivity is about 1 K either way, and not the 3.3 K imagined by the IPCC – and that was, after all, the point of my original commentary. One needs to keep these things in some sort of perspective.
Finally, the blogger, on her own site, asks me to explain in detail why the rate of change in temperature per unit rate of change in radiative flux is simply the temperature divided by (four times the flux). Since the blogger sneers so repeatedly at my knowledge of these matters, she will surely not be willing to take lessons from me, so may I advise her to refer to any elementary textbook of calculus? She will find the relevant rules for simple differentiations in Chapter 1, and may find it useful to commit them to memory. In all the climatology papers on this differential that I have seen, it is regarded as so blindingly obvious that it is taken for granted and used without further comment or explanation. See, e.g., Hansen (1984).
It would have been better and more honest if the blogger had simply admitted she’d gotten things wrong from the get-go. If she wants to faff about any further in her little molehill, she can. I shall be standing back and gazing at the lofty mountains, and at the distant stars beyond, and asking that great question that unites every man of true science with every man of true religion: “I wonder …?”
” The brilliant Chris Essex explains it thus: when outgoing radiation in the right wavelengths of the near-infrared meets a molecule of a greenhouse gas such as CO2, it sets up a quantum resonance in the gas molecule, turning it into a miniature radiator”
Is this a joke (I hope so)
So the flawed and ridiculous GHG backradiation theory has now been dropped and changed to radiation acting as a fuel for CO2 that results in energy from this radiation fuel being massively increased when it interacts with CO2. This increased energy then returns to earth’s surface to further heat the surface.
Unbelievably.
Great stuff Chris, I’m in Queensland now and look forward to your next visit. I may be with the Actors Equity demonstrators out the front. You provide great entertainment for $20 but you have to pay your union fees.
R. de Haan says:
September 29, 2011 at 10:03 pm
Thanks. An excellent post
I’m still not sure though if this section by Lord Monckton was for real or not.
If radiation fuel and CO2 equals increased energy from CO2 miniature radiators. Surely this is a potential new energy source. But of course it is not.
Even if English is not my first language, in all others languages I speak (German,French,Russian,Spanish and a few more), using only a surname of a person when adressing her is perceived as being offensive and rude.
Regardless of titles (Dr, Lord, Eminence etc) which are just a convention, I think everybody would agree that writing :
“Liljgren pulled this value out of her hat”
or
“Lucia pulled this value out of her hat”
or
“Lucia Liljgren pulled this value out of her hat”
doesn’t convey exactly the same attitude.
And clearly it is the first that is percieved as the rudest, the second conveys familiarity and the third is neutral.
Of course one can be right despite being rude but I prefer when a communication focuses on proper forms as well as on correct content.
Dear Americans,
Christopher Monckton most likely spent every day of his school life addressed only as “Monckton” (or possibly Monckton Minor to distinguish him from his father) by his schoolmasters and many of his friends. This was the normal protocol at English Public schools such as Harrow.
Jim D says:
September 29, 2011 at 8:40 pm
*The temperature rose 6-8 degrees coming out of the ice ages, which also indicates a high climate sensitivity (positive feedback) to albedo changes that can’t be explained by albedo alone.
——————————
What was the Albedo at the height of the ice ages. Today it is 29.83%, what was it during the ice ages, when 70% Albedo glacers got all the way to Chicago (and what was it in other times in the past).
Hansen says it only went up to 30.85% in the ice ages (signalling a high CO2 sensitivity) but others have calculated it at 33.0% (which would signal a very low CO2 sensitivity).
Hansen really had to twist the numbers to get such a small change from all that extra ice, snow and desert (and then he would have had to also include a large reduction in cloud cover as well – while the current global warming proposition says that cloud cover decreases when it gets warmer – so we have a reduction in cloud cover when it gets colder and also when it gets warmer). Tuning to get what you want?
Albedo is actually capable of explaining all the changes in the climate and makes much more sense in that we have had major ice ages with CO2 levels at 11 to 30 times higher than today.
There is no average atmospheric temperature on Earth. There is only a left-skewed heat distribution strongly skewed towards low temperatures.
Almost all warming must occur at the biggest heat sinks which are the deep oceans and polar ice caps.
There will he no discernible increase in temperature in places that are not extremely cold.
“But we’re not looking at an electronic amplifier here, with constant feedback. In a system where sensitivity is inversely proportional to temperature, it is almost impossible to make the the system unstable.”
In that case we’re looking at an electronic amplifier where the input signal modulates the CL gain. This concept is exactly what achieves the constant amplitude that has become today’s standard for almost all genre’s of music. So rather than look for a ‘tipping’ point, we should look to define the climate ‘clipping’ point.
“If radiation fuel and CO2 equals increased energy from CO2 miniature radiators. Surely this is a potential new energy source. But of course it is not.”
Better to think of it like lots of isotropic radio antennas – all resonant at the precise frequency and within the beamwidth of a large transmitter with a very large direction antenna array. The many smaller antennae will re-radiate the energy at the same frequency – but in all directions.
Bananabender,
There’s a difference between a schoolmaster at a public school addressing a student by his surname and the tone and manner in which Lucia is addressing Lord Monckton. And Lucia claimed that she did not attack Lord Mockton in spite of it being obvious to anyone with an ouce of sense that she’s been nasty and attacking in her tone and words and the title of her post.
And Lord Monckton’s reply about the peer-reviewed article he cited and the Plack constant is spot on. If Lucia has problems about the Kimoto paper, she should write to the authors and the journal and have it retracted or corrected.
And the Planck constant value used by Lord Monckton is the value IPCC uses. Lord Monckton accepted IPCC’s values as correct for the purpose of his article and showed that even with their own assumptions and values their calculations of climate sensitivity was wrong. This seems obvious to everyone except Lucia who is ranting off unreasonably on a tanget. She made a blooper and has been digging herself into a deeper hole with her attitude.
RJ, in a comment above, does not draw a proper distinction between back-radiation, such as can be measured from the undersides of clouds (one reason why on winter nights it does not freeze when there are clouds), and the radiative transport of energy from a photon to a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere, which then oscillates at the quantum level, radiating in all directions. The latter – even that fraction of it that radiates downward – is not, properly speaking, back-radiation at all, in the same sense as the return of radiation from the undersides of clouds.
Likewise, it is important to recall the law of conservation of energy, which is to the effect that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Of course no new energy is created when a photon meets a greenhouse-gas molecule: it is merely transferred, so that instead of passing out into space it stays in the atmosphere and warms it by the agency of the greenhouse-gas molecule.
These concepts are elementary. Naturally in a short compass it is not possible to explain them all adequately or in detail: but my original commentary was written for experts in the field, whom I could rely upon to be familiar with them.
I realize there is a small, tiresome, wilfully ignorant faction that does not want to admit the existence of the greenhouse effect at all: but they convince no one but themselves. The evidence for the greenhouse effect has not – as far as I know – been explicitly refuted in the reviewed literature; nor, outside the literature, have I seen any compelling, properly-argued, scientific case against it. There is, however, extensive literature arguing against a very large warming effect from adding very small quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere, and my commentary drew attention to some of that.
One is glad that MikeA finds my scientific discussions entertaining. As the poet Horace wrote, “Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci”.
And Lucia’s now entering the realms of the absurd straw clutching type about the Kimoto 2009 fiasco by stating in her blog that 90% of the articles in E&E are wrong and implying that it is pointless to submit rebuttals. One wonders if she would care to back up that claim with facts. After all, she is the expert on such minutiae and diligence to facts, isn’t she? Has she ever tried to rebut or submit a comment on any article published in E&E? Can she show that she tried and was rebuffed?
And it also begs the question, if it offends her so much that Lord Monckton quoted Kimoto 2009 that she can vent her spleen for days together in multiple posts ranting and raving, how about trying to set right the source of the offence, which is the Kimoto paper? Did she even give it a try?
This post of hers implies that she has realised that it was stupid to criticise Lord Monckton for citing a peer-reviewed paper and taking him to task for that paper’s results. But instead of having the grace to admit that, she has decided to find tenuous reasons for justifying her stand. And the fact that she is harping about it in thread after thread in her blog, shows a distinct lack of class and commonsense.
Tom Vonk – unfortunately in America using just a surname is common practice – look at a tv show like House for example – none of them are known by their first names. not one
Darren Parker,
So educated professionals should conform to television shows?
Here’s what lucia won’t let me post on her site.
In my considered opinion the rudeness is complementary and misunderstandings necessarily follow from that. When the rudeness has antecedents, Katie bar the door.
=======================
Yeah, venter, I wanted to ask her the source of that 90%, but she’s gagged me with straw.
==================
The climate science debates are all incompetent, and intellectual avoidance of the critical, definitive evidence against the greenhouse effect is on display everywhere, due to a tragically blind faith in the peer-reviewed literature (which after all is responsible for the incompetent IPCC-sponsored “consensus”). The truth is that peer-review is known to be fundamentally corrupted, and the climate literature is absolutely full of scientific garbage (the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget diagram the prime example), so Christopher Monckton’s approach of trying to work from the peer-review literature to form a true “consensus” is in vain. At bottom, his efforts are just the avoidance behavior of “lukewarm” believers in the greenhouse effect, who simply have not been able and/or willing to really question the radiative transfer theory that must fall right along with the greenhouse effect hypothesis. The only point he makes that is cogent in the context of the truth that there is no greenhouse effect (an increase in atmospheric temperature due to an increase in carbon dioxide) is that the Earth’s surface cannot be treated as a blackbody. With that clear admission, late in coming and under-emphasized as the prime example of THE key error in the radiation transfer theory, lukewarm belief in the IPCC-sponsored greenhouse effect must fall, as my elementary and proper comparison of temperatures in the atmospheres of Venus and Earth makes obvious — yes, obvious, and it should have been obvious 20 years ago when the Venus temperature-pressure data was obtained (that is how incompetent climate science and all the debates really are). From that analysis, the “CO2 climate sensitivity” may be observed to be -0.03°C +/- 0.1°C, or more properly, ESSENTIALLY ZERO. It doesn’t exist. The real effect of increased atmospheric CO2, I claim, is to increase the efficiency/speed of heat transfer within the atmosphere, by increasing the radiative component of that heat transfer — as one of my readers has put it, it merely acts as a heat transfer “lubricant”; it does not change the fundamental equilibrium heat distribution dictated by the governing hydrostatic condition (as long understood in the definition of the Standard Atmosphere). Climate science got off-track when it ignored the fundamental implications of the Standard Atmosphere, and embraced the very idea of “runaway climate”, which was needed so that other scientists could pretend to know the geological past of Earth. That ancient past is not known, and the entire edifice of the earth sciences is a towering monument to empty speculations piled upon unsupported assumptions.
RJ says:
September 30, 2011 at 2:42 am
R. de Haan says:
September 29, 2011 at 10:03 pm
“Thanks. An excellent post”
You’re most welcome but you should thank Prof. Nasif Nahle because he performed the experiment, the measurements and wrote the report.
I only play messenger but do understand the classic greenhouse gas theory.
I only think bigger, more dominating processes dominate leaving the greenhouse gas theory for what it really is. A big, big storm in a very small glass of water, irrelevant by all means and not wort a single dime spending on.
And while we burn all this energy on the subject the political AGW doctrine increases in power.
We have to stop it.
I want my incandescent light bulb back, my electricity and fuel prices down and the freaking bird shredders out of my sight. I want a complete elimination of all emission standards which are now based on CO2 emissions eliminated, I want all eco taxes and all related hubris about clean energy and sustainability eliminated. I want to see an end to the mandatory bio fuel use processing food crops stopped together with all the peak oil hubris. I also want an end to the backslapping and finger pointing of humanity “destroying the planet” and UN Agenda 21 that is intended to put us all in green shackles. And finally I want the quest from the eco fascists for World Government terminated ASAP.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Here’s what lucia won’t let me post after Arthur Smith’s latest comment:
Arthur clouds the issue with water vapor feedback.
==========
Takes me back,
why? I know not,
to Donald Crowhurst’s log.
Specifically the page headed “The Knot” and the idea that Maths is the only certain ground that man today occupies in the Kingdom of God.
Septic Matthew says:
September 29, 2011 at 5:29 pm
Phil says: “First the temperature at 5km above sea level is linked to the temperature at the surface via the lapse rate, if the temperature at 5km goes up so does that at the surface.”
That’s the equilibrium case. With disequilibrium “forcings” provided daily by sunrise and sunset, cloud formation and precipitation, there may never be equilibrium. You could have the 5km and surface temperatures swing in opposite directions for a few hours (leading eventually to weeks and years), and the equilibrium assumption be wrong by only a few percent, yet useless for human planing.
Temperature inversions do exist but for the most part the lapse rate applies
Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 30, 2011 at 6:03 am
Thanks for replying
” I realize there is a small, tiresome, wilfully ignorant faction that does not want to admit the existence of the greenhouse effect at all”
There is a group that do not want to admit that they might have made a mistake by accepting without question this GHG backradiation theory.
If there are 100 balls in a box and 25 are thrown upwards and 1 returns. All this will do at best is slow the cooling rate very slightly as 81 balls are now in the box not 80 (it does not increase the number to 101 and cause warming). But as all this happens at the speed of light the reduced cooling rate will be tiny and make almost no difference to the average temperature over a period. It will never increase the highest possible daily temperature.
GHG backradiation is mostly fiction. Doubling CO2 will make no difference whatsoever. How can it
A cooler atmosphere can not warm a warmer surface. And also this
“Likewise, it is important to recall the law of conservation of energy, which is to the effect that energy can neither be created nor destroyed”
The sun and only the sun warms the surface. GHG backradiation at best slows the cooling rate by a fraction of a second.
And CO2 becoming a miniature radiator. Please confirm that this is a joke.
“and 25 are thrown upwards ”
Ops 20 ball are thrown upwards
Re: positive feedback, empirical CS estimates
You propose a theoretical upper limit of 0.1 for climatic positive feedback, based on analogy to electronic-circuit design parameters. This appears arbitrary, but I see you have given the matter considerable thought. Can you please post a link to your longer paper on this topic?
I’m not questioning that there has to be a small upper limit to positive feedback — a large positive feedback would lead to Venus-like conditions, which (obviously) hasn’t happened. Based on empirical studies, I’m comfortable with a “best guess” of around a 1.5 deg. C temperature rise for doubling CO2. These empirical estimates also have problems, but at least they are based on actual observations, as opposed to theoretical estimates.
Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon has an interesting layman’s discussion of positive feedback at http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2010/09/positive-feedback/
I like his Jimi Hendrix analogy, but he loses me at the internet reader-response bit.
Incidentally, Prof. Nielsen-Gammon’s informal “best guess” for CS is around 2 deg. C, within a range of 1.5 to 4:
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2011/08/roger-pielke-jr-s-inkblot/
Thanks for your interesting article and responses,
Peter D. Tillman
Professional geologist, amateur climatologist
@Monckton of Brenchley (why do I keep thinking it is bletchley? A cryptic question?)
Serious request: After finding my internet down all day, by chance yours was the only web page left and having reread it properly when awake, it is really such a tremendous piece of work that it needs making available to a wider audience who don’t have the benefit of your first class classical education.
But before I embark on such an enterprise, can I ask whether you or anyone else has already produced it in a simpler form?
Mike Haseler
Quote: “The real debate is not on whether there is a greenhouse effect (there is), but on how much warming our rather small perturbation of the atmosphere with additional concentrations of greenhouse gases will cause (not a lot).”
Surely, you have not proven in any way, scientifically, that the warming of CO2 (by re-radiating earth-shine at 14-15 um) is greater than the cooling (by re-radiating sunshine, various wavelengths 0-5 um). Neither have you given any indication of how much heat is chewed up by the CO2 by taking part in the life cycle process( plants and trees need CO2 and warmth to grow)
So how do you know for sure that the net effect of more CO2 is warming rather than cooling?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
Lucia Liljegren is in danger of losing many normally loyal readers here.
Kimoto makes it quite clear after (18) that he is aware it is an approximation and that the other fluxes are not T^4.
Why is this fact not mentioned?
The reason he uses T^4 as the first approximation is mainly because this is the largest of the fluxes. If a different form was used the result would not be hugely
different – if we suppose the other fluxes are linear in T, for example, Kimoto’s equation becomes
lambda = -(4 Fs,r + Fs,e + Fs,t)/T
and his 6.8 becomes 5.8, a change of only about 15%.
Furthermore, the numerical values of Fs,e and Fs,t are not well known and neither is the form of their dependence on T.
My question yesterday regarding whether she contacted Kimoto to ask him about this was not answered.
Why devote so much time and energy to this anyway?
CM has posted something at WUWT which has no chance of publication, yet she demands that he justify every step of the mathematical arguments in a paper written by someone else! (Something which we are aware he is not able to do, so her attempts to catch him out are quite pointless).
He has explained where he got the numbers from, and yet the false accusation in her thread title (‘out of a hat’) remains.
Why does she not insist that climate scientists whose papers ARE published, explain every step and assumption in their derivations?
I hope she will take note of the comments from Julian Flood, venter and oxonmoron here, and from Noelene, MikeC, gallopingcamel, Heretic and PMH on her blog, which normally is a good example of balance and fairness, but when the subject of CM arises, all this seems to be abandoned.
Kim,
Sad to see that your posts are getting deleted at Lucia’s place.
Lucia’s becoming no different than RC or Tamino in deleting uncomfortable posts and questions. She just wants her own echo chamber it looks like.
How about a phone call, or a meet-up? One of the things I love about blogs is that people can argue without coming to blows, or, worse yet, agreement.
=================
Venter, not deleted. I can always post once, then I go to timeout. I can have both hands tied behind my back and my mouth filled with straw and still make my point. I dance, joyfully.
=====================
Spot on PaulM. Lucia’s completely lost it here. She reacted to CM like a bull reacts to red flag, purely based on emotion, throwing caution and reason to the winds and has come out of the whole issue with a poorer reputation.She’s done everything wrong.
First she criticised CM’s english as florid and opaque,when her own english on her blog posts on this issue was of extremely poor quality, as pointed out by Dave Wendt in the earlier thread. English language is not a field where she should be duelling with CM as she’s nowhere compared to his command of the language.
Then she criticised CM’s representation of facts, before backing down, rightly.
Then she claimed that she did not attack CM, when it was obvious to everyone that she was rude, insulting and attacking.
Then she took off on him to explain every mathematical equation in a published paper which he cited, when she did not seem to have asked the same questions to the paper’s author or the journal concerned for the past 2 years.
Then she selectively quotes Kimoto, leaving out vital information given in the paper about the approximations, like you mentioned. That, in my books, reeks of dishonesty, something she’s literally accusing CM of.
Then she refuses to retract the false accusation of pulling numbers out of the hat in her thread title, after CM shows where he got the numbers from.
Then she doesn’t even seem to get it that CM used IPCC’s own figures for the Planck parameter, for the purposes of this discussion at WUWT, even though he repeated it multiple times.
Then she goes on a tangent about E&E being a bad journal with 90% of articles wrong, without providing basis or evidence for that 90% claim. That argument itself was specious and irrelevant to CM’s article here. But it showed the level of her desperation. On one hand, she accuses CM of pulling numbers out of the hat with no basis. In the same breath, she pulls out numbers with no basis, making a sweeping statement of 90% wrong against E&E, giving no evidence. How’s that for hypocrisy? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and she should either put up or retract. When people want to question her about it, she deletes posts and gags them.
And lastly it’s bad ethics, manners and also cowardly to run away to her own blog and challenge CM on obscure maths from her ramparts, insisting only on a narrow and irrelevant viewpoint of hers about the maths of Kimoto, when CM’s original post was here at WUWT and it encompassed a different issue of which Kimoto was only a cite. If she had any class or manners, she should have stated her arguments here. CM’s article was at WUWT. If she wants to contest it she should do it here. Anthony moderates with a light touch and does not delete or censor posts unless they are abusive.
All in all, it’s been a poor and graceless performance from Lucia.
That is a chamber orchestra which simply outplays any dissonance from ‘lukewarming and do something about it’. The trouble is twofold, warming is good, and we are cooling.
===============
Lord Monckton wrote
quote
“Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci”
unquote
You, my lord, are too mischievous for your own good.
JF
(Who failed the Latin stream in the third form….)
[Reply: You should give the translation when posting: “He has gained every point, who has combined the useful with the agreeable.” ~dbs, mod.]
Henry P. @ 8:42.
I think we will know the answer to that one when we know what rising CO2 does to humidity. I’ve been waiting, though, for CO2 to earn demonization as a cooling agent. After all, rising CO2 in the paleontological litchurchur is always followed by cooling, sooner or later.
NB, this comment is only half in jest.
=============
Venter, she has posted it here.
===========
Phil says: Temperature inversions do exist but for the most part the lapse rate applies
“for the most part” is a rephrasing of what I have been writing. It’s the “other part” that I have been emphasizing: the “other part” (what I have been calling “model inaccuracy” and such) is large enough to call into question whether anyone actually knows what will happen if more CO2 is added to Earth atmosphere. By the mechanism of increasing the power in uprising columns of warm, moist air (the well-known thermals), increasing cloud cover, and increasing rainfall, increased CO2 could cool the lower troposphere and surface and warm the upper troposphere, and the “lapse rate” would still “apply”. The mathematical models can have an error rate of only 3% or less and still predict the wrong sign of the change induced (if any) by increased CO2.
I should add that, if increased temperatures produce increased cloud cover and increased rain, WUWT should revisit the paper in Nature last winter that showed an increase, across decades, in the maximum recorded rainfalls in the American Central regions. Willis Eschenbach wrote a somewhat insightful but seriously flawed critique of it here on WUWT. While no paper can be perfect, that was fundamentally sound, and will hopefully be followed by other papers using the same methodology (using the generalized extreme value distribution to model extremes.) While indirect (we need simultaneous measures of temperature and rainfall as in the TAO data that Willis is analyzing), it supports his idea that increased temperatures provide negative/quenching feedbacks to inhibit further temperature increases.
Lastly, I was musing on some episodes in the history of science. It has often happened that major contributions were made by amateurs and others who were intensely disparaged by the majority of professionals in the field. Florence Nightingale, for example, knew nothing about either soldiering or medicine, and the mechanism by which cleanliness improved the survival chances of wounded soldiers was totally unknown. You can think of other examples, though not all were disparaged (Wright Brothers, Gregor Mendel.) Christopher Monckton of Brenchley is following their example, and to great effect, it seems to me.
Heh, lucia’s got a rhetorical question over there: What Would Trenberth Say?
=============================
henry@Kim
If you understood how the GH effect works and the principle of subsequent re-radiation,
you are actually one of very few people,
as I experienced again just now here,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/28/video-analysis-and-scene-replication-suggests-that-al-gores-climate-reality-project-fabricated-their-climate-101-video-simple-experiment/#comment-755822
dscott wrote: When you insist on measuring the response of the atmosphere in C or K to Watts/meter^2 you are comparing Apples to Oranges.
On that I think you are mistaken. If the rate of energy inflow increases, the total energy will accumulate sufficiently to raise the mean temperature until the rate of energy outflow equals (at least averaged over the years) the rate of energy inflow. The temperature at which that happens will be measured in C or K, even though the rate of inflow in measured in Watts/meter^2.
Imagine a blanket, HenryP, woven of your own guilt. Isn’t it oppressive?
===============
A thought about politeness: on the internet everything can be made to sound like an insult, “including ‘the’ and ‘and'”. (I think that’s from Dorothy Parker, about Lillian Hellman.) If you have been accused of writing an insult, the best thing to do is apologize and try more respectfully next time. There is probably no way left to refer to Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley that has not been used in mockery by someone.
Consider his phrase “the inimitable Willis Eschenbach”: Christopher Monckton meant it in context respectfully, as probably everyone recognized, but “the inimitable” has been used mockingly millions of times. You have to read multiple interchanges to appreciate their mutual respect.
I suspect that there is no way left that Lucia Liljegren and Lord Monckton can refer to each other in internet postings that does not sound like a cut. Maybe they can meet in person some day and patch things up. Here’s hoping.
Willis Eschenbach says:
September 29, 2011 at 11:01 am
Your points are well expressed and pertinent.
@Kim
Lucia’s site is in the dumps right now. She is moderating comments like a banshee that has adhd. She is very upset that Monckton is schooling her. She is amazed that the “team” equations are incorrect.
I’d like to believe that Jay, but I can’t quite suss it out yet. I’m looking for my arithmetic primer. It’s gotta be around here somewhere. Maybe Kevin borrowed it.
====================
Christopher.
It looks like a monktopus is squirting ink in the water
“Finally, the blogger, on her own site, asks me to explain in detail why the rate of change in temperature per unit rate of change in radiative flux is simply the temperature divided by (four times the flux). Since the blogger sneers so repeatedly at my knowledge of these matters, she will surely not be willing to take lessons from me, so may I advise her to refer to any elementary textbook of calculus? She will find the relevant rules for simple differentiations in Chapter 1, and may find it useful to commit them to memory. In all the climatology papers on this differential that I have seen, it is regarded as so blindingly obvious that it is taken for granted and used without further comment or explanation. See, e.g., Hansen (1984).
First things first. Both Hansen and Gavin have resorted to the childish game of not mentioning the name of their critics. It’s delightful to see you sink to their level of discourse. However, the equation in question is not in Hansen 1984. you are mistaken
Maybe you are avoiding posting the exact equations because you dont know Latex. That would be odd, Nevertheless, readers can see that the equation Lucia asked you to discuss is not in Hansen 1984.
I really enjoy the fact that you challenge AGW folks to debates. I challenge you to debate Lucia. On her site where we can see you explain your derivation. Tom Vonk comes there, Tom will probably help you with the Latex if thats a problem for you.
The mathematically inclined folks can read the real equation here
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/monckton-neither-0-15-wk-m2-nor-0-18-wk-m2-are-the-kt-implicit-planck-parameter/#comments
Doug,
I think our thoughts on Cryogenian-Ediacaran dolomite formation have been lost in the ether, and Monckton has not responded either. Perhaps he is relaxing with a good malt and reading some of the interesting papers I linked directly to for your joint benefits.
However, I maintain that both he and, by connection, Plimer, are very sweeping in their oversimplification of this distant point in time, and that the stratigraphy of this sequence throws up many things that show that their cover-all-in-a-few-words statements about it look a bit, no very, silly once scrutinised. If the boot were on the other foot, some regulars of certain blogs, this one included, would be onto the matter like a pack of wolves: specifically, had the IPCC said, “In the Neoproterozoic, 750 Ma BP, CO2 concentration (today <0.04%) was ~30%: otherwise the ocean’s magnesium ions could not have united with the abundance of calcium ions and with CO2 itself to precipitate the dolomitic rocks laid down in that era. Yet mile-high glaciers came and went twice at sea level at the equator", the shout would have gone up and echoed from valley to valley, the light from beacon to beacon. Fox News would have had "NEOPROTEROZOICGATE" across the banner on each news bulletin. This is a classic case of the fact that confirmation-bias can go both ways, but either way it is not a good thing.
Regards,
Mason
(PS – FYI folk Stateside, at the time Monckton and I were at school – not the same one – we would both have been routinely addressed by our surnames, and indeed in discussions of science it is standard form to use same, so don't think us Brits rude or anything. In those formative years, the greatest fear tended to be the way in which one's surname was called out in any gathering like Assembly). Google to see if there's a video of Ripping Yarns – Tomkinson's Schooldays – if you don't believe me!
The more I follow the application (or mis-application) of control theory to climate, the more anxious I become about the concepts.
1) The use of static gain equations to infer stability, or lack of it, ignores both extensive and intensive variables being functions of time. This has very serious implications.
For example, there are extensive analogies to amplifiers. The static gain of an amplifier only tells one a certain amount about its stability, because the dynamic stability is dependent ensuring that phase shifts within the forward and feedback components maintain negative feedback through the dynamic range of the system.
2) Following from above, I am increasingly astonished that the climate community has at last realised delays between responses and inputs may be important, e.g: Spencer&Bracewell 2011, which in a context of control is somewhat surprising. However, the analysis of supposed feedback in climate systems seems to be unrigorous at a first year undergraduate level.
3) The celebrated Spencer/Bracewell equation is (slightly rearranged):
dDT/dt=lambda/CpDT +sigma[fluxes]/Cp.
Lambda is interpreted as a feedback parameter.
This equation is simply a first order linear differential equation and is directly equivalent physically to resistor/capacitor network, dye passing through a mixing chamber or a spring connected to dashpot. There is no feedback whatsoever in this model. The system imposes a delay, which is immediately apparent since integration of the equation results in an impulse response of e-(lambda.t/Cp). However, the delay, which is in fact a frequency dependent phase shift, are intrinsic to any linear system that can store energy and have nothing to do with feedback.
4) Following from this, the feedback models that have been discussed recently are not physically realisable because any physical system imposes a delay, which may have substantial effects on the dynamic properties of the system.
5) If one wishes to analyse a linear control system, this is more easily done in the complex frequency domain using Integral transform. While it is unlikely that the climate system is linear, it may well be Linearisable, in other words over relatively small variations, the non-linear terms are small and can be ignored. This approach is taken by Judith Curry in the chapter(13) on thermodynamic control and she writes a general set of equations descibng feedback as set of functionals of the internal system variables. Although, these are not explicitly stated as functions of time, the ODEs in each functional can be, recast by expressing them in terms of Fourier or Laplace transforms. In this case, the model can by analysed using conventional control theory.
6) The most troublesome aspect of this debate is that professional climatologists are claiming to use control theory to make comments of climate stability but, in fact, their approach seems superficial. This has a very important implication. If one is using an incorrect theory to describe a system, the methods used to analyse it become suspect. There is a huge body of work on system identification which, if one assumes that the climate can be treated as linear control system, lend themselves to the problem. The widespread use of regression (which was developed for a completely different problem that is not equivalent to control systems) to identify feedback in a system that, according to the authors’ mathematics does not actually contain feedback, would appear to be a case in point.
A monktopus, eh? Don’t they prey on prawns?☺
After clicking on the link Steven Mosher provided, I see that Dr Lucia is going ballistic. There’s no way a fair debate could be held on her blog.
moshe, his high and mightiness has used lucia’s name, at least once, so you can drop that trope. I’d put them both in timeout, together.
============
And he used ‘Lucia’, which is how she identified herself on the thread. That seems normal, at least to me.
============
davidmhoffer says:
The fact that this constitutes a “negative feedback” is either implicitly or explicitly understood. When it is implicitly understood, scientists define the first-order temperature effect by how much the temperature has to rise to overcome the radiative imbalance implied by the forcing. So, this becomes the zeroth-order temperature change…and any increase or decrease in this zeroth-order effect is describes by subsequent feedbacks.
When it is explicitly understood, scientists will define the zeroth-order effect simply as the increase in radiative forcing (rather than a certain change in temperature) and then the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation is indeed considered to be an important negative feedback that serves to restore radiative balance.
Either way of looking at the problem yields the same answer to any specific question (like how much will the temperature rise?) and hence it is sort of a matter of personal preference which view to adopt.
To be continued…with comments on the rest of your post…
quote
[Reply: You should give the translation when posting: “He has gained every point, who has combined the useful with the agreeable.” ~dbs, mod.]
unquote
May I refer the honourable gentleman to:
Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 30, 2011 at 6:03 am
JF
To Scottish Sceptic: Thank you very much for being so kind about my Commentary for Remote Sensing, and for suggesting that I should produce a simpler version. Normally I’d do just that, but this time I’m reluctant, because in certain quarters every simplification, however justifiable, is pounced on and denounced as though it were a fundamental error.
For instance, Stephen Mosher, who has been participating rather negatively but not learnedly in this thread, has recent called me silly names because, he says, I was wrong to state that Dr. Hansen had used the first differential of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer in his ground-breaking paper of 1984, from which the IPCC has scarcely departed since. And Lucia Liljegren, also more incandescent than luminescent, has demanded that I should explain that differential to her and has said that not only I but Kimoto (2009) have used it incorrectly.
The fundamental equation of radiative transfer is
F = (epsilon)(sigma)(T^4),
where F is radiative flux, epsilon is emissivity (usually taken as constant at unity), sigma is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant 5.67 x 10^-8 W/m^2/K^-4, and T is global mean temperature at the characteristic-emission surface of an astronomical body. It is one of the great equations of classical physics.
One thing one needs to know – indeed, THE thing one needs to know in the climate debate – is how much temperature change we shall get in response to a given change in radiative flux. Taking the first differential of the equation tells us that, because the differential is the change in temperature per unit change in radiative flux.
The differential can be written in various forms. The one used by Kimoto (2009) and by me is –
delta-T / delta-F = T / (4F).
It’s as simple as that. Since this differential is expressed in terms of both T and F, we can drop out the two constants epsilon and sigma, because they have already done their work in determining the relative magnitudes of T and F.
Now, Hansen’s 1984 paper, contrary to what Stephen Mosher says, of course uses the first differential of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation in his 1984 paper. However, he uses a different but functionally-identical form:
delta-T / delta-F = [4(epsilon)(sigma)(T^3)]^-1
I say “functionally-identical” because the two expressions of course give an identical result: they are saying the same thing in slightly different language.
Just to confuse matters, Hansen makes a mistake in his Eq. (13), in which the differential appears, omitting the vital factor 4 in the written expression, though coming to the right answer all the same.
Let us demonstrate that these two forms of the differential are functionally identical by applying both forms of the differential at the characteristic-emission surface of the Earth, around 5 km above mean sea level, where incoming and outgoing radiative fluxes balance by definition.
We know that the incoming flux is 1368 Watts per square meter, measured by cavitometers on satellites. We divide this by 4 to allow for the ratio of the surface area of the disk that the Earth presents to the Sun’s incoming radiation to the surface area of the rotating sphere, and we also reduce it by 30% to allow for the Earth’s albedo, which reflects that proportion of the Sun’s rays harmlessly straight back into space. So the net incoming flux at the characteristic-emission altitude is
F = (1368/4)(1 – 0.3) = 239.4 W/m^2.
Now we need to find the characteristic-emission temperature using a rearrangement of the SB equation:
T = [F/(epsilon x sigma)]^0.25 = [239.4 / (1 x 5.67×10^-8)]^0.25 = 254.9 K.
So, using Kimoto’s version of the differential –
delta-T / delta-F = T / (4F) = 254.9 / (4 x 239.4) = 0.266 K/W/m^2.
And using Hansen’s version (corrected to include the factor 4):
delta-T / delta-F = 1 / [4(epsilon)(sigma)(T^3)] = 0.266 K/W/m^2.
So the two results agree, as one would expect them to. This nicely demonstrates that Kimoto’s differential (albeit that, like Trenberth’s, it was inappropriately taken at the Earth’s surface, which was precisely why I used it in looking at Trenberth’s error and at the consequent implicit low climate sensitivity) is indeed in one of the correct forms, despite all the screeching to the contrary that has been going on.
It also nicely demonstrates that Hansen was erroneous in dropping the factor 4 in the written expression of the differential used in his equation (13), though this was merely a typographical error – the result is given correctly as 0.27 K/W/m^2. No doubt it was this typo – easily enough done – that confused Stephen Mosher, along with the fact that Hansen’s expression of the differential was not the same as Kimoto’s, though it was nonetheless the same differential: but he would have been wiser to be more cautious before indulging in name-calling.
Now, this is just part of the mathematical background to just one of the 15 separate climate sensitivities I had sketched out in my very compressed Commentary. And, unfortunately, there are those – knowing little or nothing about what they are talking about – who will sound off in a manner that is as offensive as it is ignorant, because for whatever reason they are desperate to prove the sceptical case to be wrong. The correct approach is dispassionate, and it does require a level of mathematical knowledge that many of those who have been writing silly remarks in this thread manifestly do not possess.
So, if I may, I shall eschew any further simplification for now and continue with my economic researches. Once they are published (probably not in a reviewed journal, because the results – though correct – are fascinatingly counter-consensual), I shall be writing a book about the climate. I have long had to be careful not to allow time-wasters to divert me. Time-wasting and name-calling, together with relentless character-assassination, are among the many malevolent methods used by the forces of darkness to disrupt not just little me but the process of science itself.
My original comment about Lucia’s rudeness wasn’t to complain about her not using Christopher Monckton’s title of “lord”. I’m a Brit, and like many other Brits, don’t myself hold with titles like that, though I often do observe titles such as professor or doctor.
It’s just, as one professor has remarked, that the bald “Monckton”, especially when one knows he is the author of this thread and is following replies, is lacking in respect, and one shouldn’t be surprised if that is mirrored in his response – not as tit-for-tat, but to draw Lucia’s attention to what it feels like to be treated with disrespect.
I think Christopher Monckton has a rather impish sense of humour and quite frequently indulges in a bit of self-mockery with the use of Latin and the occasional florid phrase. But he is extremely far from being an idiot: he can show me a clean pair of heels when it comes to climate science and maths, that’s for sure.
Venter: Spot on PaulM. Lucia’s completely lost it here. She reacted to CM like a bull reacts to red flag, purely based on emotion, throwing caution and reason to the winds and has come out of the whole issue with a poorer reputation.She’s done everything wrong.
Not the math, Venter. On that, she’s correct.
Monckton of Brenchley says: @ September 30, 2011 at 3:36 pm
“….So, if I may, I shall eschew any further simplification for now and continue with my economic researches. Once they are published (probably not in a reviewed journal, because the results – though correct – are fascinatingly counter-consensual), …..”
______________________________________________________________________
Do let us know when those economic researches are publish if that is OK with Anthony. It would seem we can not disentangle CAGW from economics at this point so that is another subject the informed voter needs to be “au courant.”
Kim,
What? No poetical insights?
How about something from Oxenham?
Lord Monckton:
I am severely disappointed, Lucia has raised significant mathematical concerns about your approach to this issue, and I am finding you wanting. You are taking the approach of Mann and Hansen in your defense, and as a serious doubter of AGW you are making the issue look very poor.
I have learned it is not a wise man that duels over mathematics with Lucia. If you have a true case to make, please make it. This hand waving is getting a bit tedious. I am not interested in your new book, I am interested in getting to the bottom line. Is there a problem or not. Lucia has made a solid case, I want to hear the proper rebuttal of this, as it has not been forthcoming. Making Lucia your enemy will not further your cause, nor mine. Honestly, if she can verify your math, the case for weak AGW is better stated.
Roy Weiler
Septic Matthew says:
September 30, 2011 at 10:55 am
Matthew, I loved the description of my work, which you call “somewhat insightful but seriously flawed”. I leave it to the reader to read the citation and make up their own mind whether I am either insightful, flawed, or both.
Or neither …
Thanks,
w.
John Mason says:
September 30, 2011 at 12:53 pm
———————-
The calculated (rather than guessed at) estimates of CO2 levels at the 750 Mya snowball Earth are 5,000 ppm and for the 635 Mya snowball Earth, 12,000 ppm. CO2 needs to be something close to 300,000 ppm to end these snowballs but obviously it wasn’t CO2 (the supercontinents over the south pole broke up and drifted away from the poles and toward the equator – melting the 5 km high glaciers).
http://www.snowballearth.org/Bao08.pdf
http://www.meteo.mcgill.ca/~tremblay/Courses/ATOC530/Hyde.et.al.Nature.2000.pdf
Bill Illis, taking your 33% albedo for the ice ages, gives a forcing difference of about 10-11 W/m2 for a temperature difference of 6-8 degrees. This is a high sensitivity.
davidmhoffer says:
There are are at least a few things wrong with this analysis:
(1) Most importantly, the local surface temperature response to warming is not determined by considering the local radiative balance at the surface. In fact, there is no evidence that I know of that this is even good as some sort of very rough approximation. The troposphere is strongly coupled by convection and advection. The place to apply radiation balance is at the top-of-the-atmosphere, where one knows that the only interaction across the boundary is radiative.
(2) While it is true that the temperature rise is not uniform, it is not correct that this non-uniformity will magically make it negligible. On the positive side may be the fact that temperatures will warm more in the polar regions than at the equator (although it probably has only little to do with your reasons) and more at night than during the day, but there are negative sides too: One is that the climate will warm more over the continents than the oceans and the land is where we actually live. Also, because oceans make up over 70% of the surface area, the average temperature rise computed is weighted much more heavily toward the rise over the oceans than the rise over the continents. Furthermore, because of the simple facts of surface area on a sphere, half of the surface area of the earth lies between 30 S latitude and 30 N latitude and only 13.4% total lies poleward of 60 N latitude or 60 S latitude. This means, once again, that the average temperature over the earth’s surface is weighted much more strongly by what happens in the tropics and much less strongly by what happens near the poles. [Considering all this perhaps makes it more clear why a ~4-7 C difference in average global temperatures made the difference between Ice Age conditions and our current interglacial conditions.] So, yes, the average may be a somewhat deceiving number but going beyond it, while making things rosier in some ways, makes things decidedly less rosy in others.
Lord Monckton wrote: The fundamental equation of radiative transfer is
F = (epsilon)(sigma)(T^4),
where F is radiative flux, epsilon is emissivity (usually taken as constant at unity), sigma is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant 5.67 x 10^-8 W/m^2/K^-4, and T is global mean temperature at the characteristic-emission surface of an astronomical body. It is one of the great equations of classical physics.
One thing one needs to know – indeed, THE thing one needs to know in the climate debate – is how much temperature change we shall get in response to a given change in radiative flux. Taking the first differential of the equation tells us that, because the differential is the change in temperature per unit change in radiative flux.
The differential can be written in various forms. The one used by Kimoto (2009) and by me is –
delta-T / delta-F = T / (4F).
It’s as simple as that. Since this differential is expressed in terms of both T and F, we can drop out the two constants epsilon and sigma, because they have already done their work in determining the relative magnitudes of T and F.
Now, Hansen’s 1984 paper, contrary to what Stephen Mosher says, of course uses the first differential of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation in his 1984 paper. However, he uses a different but functionally-identical form:
delta-T / delta-F = [4(epsilon)(sigma)(T^3)]^-1
I say “functionally-identical” because the two expressions of course give an identical result: they are saying the same thing in slightly different language.
Is that all this is about?
delta-T / delta-F = T / (4F)
can be derived from
delta-T / delta-F = [4(epsilon)(sigma)(T^3)]^-1
by multiplying the RHS by 1 = (epsilon)(sigma)(T^4)/F.
Isn’t that so? What have I missed?
I find that I both agree and disagree with each of Christopher and Willis.
The effect of doubling CO2 might be around 1C all other things being equal but all other things are not equal.
The water cycle based system response wipes out most or all of that 1C.
Christopher correctly accepts the greenhouse effect in principle but needs to go a step further and incorporate a changing size or speed for the water cycle as a negative system response.
Willis rightly observes the system response in the tropics but needs to extend that principle globally. I contend that not only is there increased activity in the tropics in response to warming but additionally the entire global surface air pressure distributiuon participates in the negative system response.
If a warming or cooling effect from oceans or sun tries to alter the current system temperature then the climate zones just change size, intensity and latitudinal positions to efficiently negate that forcing by altering the size or speed of the water cycle to adjust the rate at which energy leaves to space.
The system response to changes in the quantity of GHGs is just the same but needs to be infinitesimal in comparison because the solar and oceanic forcings are so vast in comparison.
There really is not much more to say about so called anthropogenic climate change except perhaps when Murry Salby firms up on his view that the increase in CO2 has not been much to do with human emissions either.
The end of this ridiculous panic is in sight, but the cost has been, and continues to be, frightening.
Willis Eschenbach: Matthew, I loved the description of my work,
by the time I read your review, read the original paper, and then reread your review the thread was dead, so I didn’t post. There are not any perfect papers, but I think that one was worthy, and worth your rereading some time.
Your comment on the fitting of the generalized extreme value distributions to regions and standardizing regions with respect to an upper quantile was “Huh?”
I also think it supports your basic theme that, as the Earth warms, each additional increase in 1K of temperature is more counteracted by the natural processes. It’s a nonlinear feedback from output states to input rates, not unlike the Lottka-Volterra equations, only without all the parts of the mechanism yet identified and quantified. As the U.S. slightly warmed during the 20th century, the extreme rainfalls slightly increased. We may be approaching a point where increased warming is squelched by increased rainfall extremes.
I think you can estimate relationships from the TAO data that you alerted us to. I am working on it, and if I get anything I’ll let you know. There’s rainfall, wind, humidity etc data; it’s not all perfectly matched except at a few sites for some timelines, but there’s lots to look at.
Stephen Wilde wrote: Stephen Wilde says:
September 30, 2011 at 7:07 pm
Maybe (my other post agrees), but we must “nail it” as they say in other fields.
Lord Monckton, Thank you very much for your extensive replies to many of the comments!
“dscott says:
September 29, 2011 at 11:18 pm
You can not conflate a summer temperature (high humidity) as roughly proportional in heat content to winter temperatures (low humidity). You can’t assume the humidity content from year to year will even out”
I understand where you are coming from. However how much difference does it really make in the end? The percent water vapor in the atmosphere can vary from close to 0 to about 4%. Let us assume that in a dry year, the humidity averages 1% and in a humid year, it averages 3%. The specific heat capacity of air is 1.0. Let us assume the specific heat capacity of water vapor is 2.0. So if the air has 1% water vapor, the average specific heat capacity is 1.01. And if the air has 3% water vapor, the average specific heat capacity is 1.03. I know the molar mass of water is 18 and not 29, but if we just assume they are the same, then the mass of the atmosphere with 3% water vapor is 2% larger than if there is 1% water vapor. (I am also generously assuming water vapor exists evenly throughout the atmosphere and does not condense out.) Then applying mct(moist air) = mct(dry air), we find that the mc for the moist air is 4% larger than for dry air. So to balance things out, the dry air has to have a temperature change that is 4% larger than the moist air. In other words, if moist air goes up by 1.00 degrees C, the dry air, with the same energy input, would go up by 1.04 degrees C. So unless I am missing something, I would say the difference is very small. Perhaps the error bars need to be made just a wee bit larger to account for the unknown average humidity values?
Smokey:
If by going ballistic, you mean that she is correcting the errors and nonsense that need to be corrected then indeed, she is going ballistic.
If by “fair debate”, you mean a debate where nonsense and obfuscation drown out wisdom, intelligent analysis, and science, then perhaps you are right that there is no way to have a fair debate there.
Now that I have understood how to properly interpret Smokey’s comments, they are starting to make a lot more sense.
Terry MN,
Thanks for your post. I have no doubts about Lucia’s competence in maths. The key issue here is she’s barking up the wrong tree with the maths. Problems with Kimoto? Address it to the author and journal. Problems with IPCC’s values on the Planck’s constant? Take it up with them and with K&T.
Instead, she’s turned her guns full force on the messenger who cited those merely to show that as per those values the claimed sensitivity is wrong.
And if she decides that she’ll strip down everything to an obscure irrelevant mathematical point of her choosing only, it shows her narrow mindedness. And if she expects mathematical exactitude to the minutest detail, let her show the maths for her sweeping claim about 90% of E&E’s papers being wrong. Where’s the evidence of that? She has not produced it. So what right has she got to accuse CM of pulling numbers out of the hat?
That is obvious to everybody else except her and her echo chamber. See the desperate and irrational comments made there even to PaulM who politely suggested to Lucia that she’s in danger of losing level headed leaders. See the comment here from Steven Mosher calling CM as Moncktopus. Steven is fond of asking everybody else about the maths. Did he ask Lucia for the maths about her 90% claim?
Sorry, that whole bunch are behaving like kids with brain fatigue.
Werner Brozek-
yeah, you are missing something – heat of vaporization.
heat is measured in joules, not temperature, too.
Joel Shore says:
“If by going ballistic, you mean that [Lucia] is correcting the errors and nonsense that need to be corrected then indeed, she is going ballistic.
“If by ‘fair debate’, you mean a debate where nonsense and obfuscation drown out wisdom, intelligent analysis, and science, then perhaps you are right that there is no way to have a fair debate there.”
•••
Joel, get a grip on reality. A ‘debate’ on Dr Lucia’s blog, where she is the de-facto moderator, is clearly unfair. Where fair and honest debates have been held, the scientific skeptics have routinely kicked ass, and the alarmist crowd has been routed. That is a fact. Sorry if that makes your ilk uncomfortable.
Septic Matthew said:
“Maybe (my other post agrees), but we must “nail it” as they say in other fields.”
In my opinion the real world observations have already nailed it. We just need others to open their eyes.
Special for OK S.
For Friday Funnies,
See Kiehl and Trenberth’s drawing.
Laughable cartoon.
========
Joel Shore;
There are are at least a few things wrong with this analysis:
(1) Most importantly… The place to apply radiation balance is at the top-of-the-atmosphere>>>
REPLY
And yet the IPCC uses the effective black body temperature of the earth which occurrs neither at the surface nor at the TOA. Further, while they explain this in AR3, they skip the explanation completely in AR4, and the wording is such that the average reader is left with the impression that the one degree of warming is surface temperature when in fact it is not. So, if I accept your position above, then you must support the same conclusion I came to which is that the IPCC explanation is both incorrectly calculated and also presented in a misleading fashion. That is the conclusion one must draw regardless of your physics or mine being closer to the actual facts.
Joel Shore;
(2) While it is true that the temperature rise is not uniform… there are negative sides too…half of the surface area of the earth lies between 30 S latitude and 30 N latitude and only 13.4% total lies poleward of 60 N latitude or 60 S latitude. This means, once again, that the average temperature over the earth’s surface is weighted much more strongly by what happens in the tropics and much less strongly by what happens near the poles…>>>
REPLY
I agree. So what you are saying (if you stop to consider for a moment) is that most of the temperature change will be over land (where we live) but that most of the land…is in the zone that will experience the LEAST temperature change from increased levels of CO2. Thanks for reinforcing my point!
You haven’t responded at all by the way to my previous point (that no one else had responded to either). Since CO2 is logarithmic, what plausible feedback mechanism exists that would result in linear or exponential warming? If such a feedback mechanism exists, why did it not result in catastrophic changes when initial increases in CO2 were % wise far larget per PPM than they ever will be again?
steven mosher says:
September 30, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Thanks, Mosh. I am saddened to see the name calling.
Returning to the math, like Lucia I cannot see any way to derive Kimoto’s Equation 18 from his Equation 17. So my vote goes with Lucia on the math. Kimoto is wrong, as far as I can see.
This is because the only way that Kimoto could be right is if, like radiative losses, both evapotranspiration losses and conduction losses were to vary strictly proportionally with the fourth power of the temperature. If that were true, Equation 18 could be derived from Equation 17.
However, I have not seen any indication that the evapotransporative and conductive losses vary in that manner. Both do go up fast with temperature (with the usual caveats about thresholds), but not with a simple T^4 relationship.
w.
HenryP says:
September 30, 2011 at 8:42 am
“Quote: “The real debate is not on whether there is a greenhouse effect (there is), ”
If by green house effect you mean GHG backradiation.
GHG backradiation has been built on an impossible proposition. It has then been supported by maths and various models. But maths or flash models does not make the impossible possible.
The impossible proposition is
100 units of energy leave earth’s surface as radiation (at the speed of light).
Over 90 units escape to outer space and never return.
Under 10 units interact with CO2 and under half (under 5 units) return to the earth’s surface.
These 5 units replace the energy lost of the 100 units and some more energy on top.
Various models have been developed and various formulas used. But common sense and a reasonableness test has not been applied.
The GHG backradiation theory is flawed.
I don’t think people understand what Christopher Monckton is trying to do here.
He is simply trying to find out if, using the math (correct or incorrect) and data (real or imaginary) that the IPPC accepts as true, we can come up with the climate sensitivity that they claim.
It does not matter if the math is correct, only if it is the math that the IPCC accepts.
It does not matter if the data is correct, only if it is the data that the IPCC accepts.
Then, using their math, and their data, do we arrive at the climate sensitivity they claim?
His conclusion is that we do not, even using their math and data.
In other words, he is saying that their logic is not internally self consistent.
Also, some people say that he should do this or that to find out what the truth is, say, to take this or that into account.
I don’t think he is trying to find the truth here, only what is NOT the truth.
He is attempting to show that the IPCC is not telling the truth, even if we accept all their math and data.
“”Instead of applying observation to the things we wished to know, we have chosen rather to imagine them. Advancing from one ill-founded supposition to another, we have at last bewildered ourselves amidst a multitude of errors….
Once we know that is NOT true, we can then do this:
“…When matters have been brought this length, when errors have been thus accumulated, there is but one remedy by which order can be restored to the faculty of thinking; this is, to forget all that we have learned, to trace back our ideas to their source, to follow the train in which they rise, and, as my Lord Bacon says, to frame the human understanding anew.”” Lavoisier
OK, NOW we can look for truth, what is really going on with the climate, what actual effect increasing CO2 has, if any.
Probably in another, separate WUWT post.
As for the idea of showing the economics of this, one can use some of the IPCC’s own methodology here, and look for feedbacks, tipping points, sort of economic sensitivities if you will, which I suspect could be quite high. Example, lets say that they get at least some of what they want, well, this will hurt the economy. However, they are bureaucrats, they live off of other people’s taxes, and now the tax base has shrunk. What to do, simple, raise the tax rate (probably disguised as something, say carbon credits or some such). This will then hurt the economy more, and you need to raise the tax rate even more to keep living the lifestyle that a planet saver such as yourself deserves, feedback. Lets say that you manage to lower power production (all those coal fired plants), well, now there is not enough power to go around. However, you, the planet saver, still deserve to live that lifestyle, so YOU get all the power you want, and there is even less left over for anyone else (and now the tax base goes down again). And lets say that in all this planet saving, some people get a little annoyed at what you have been doing, when you hear about that, what actions will you take to prevent any little “accidents” that might happen, and what will be the result of that? And when you take those actions, even more people get even more annoyed, and now you need to take even more actions, feedback.
Lets see one possible tipping point. You bring in major “green energy”, far more expensive and rather unreliable. Businesses now wish to relocate elsewhere, say China, where power is plentiful and cheap. China now realizes that you are dependant on them, how will they use that? If they use that in ways you don’t want, will you be tempted to turn the people against them so that they are angry at someone else instead of you, the person who lost them their job? So now how will China then react, and how will you react to that. What may seem like a smallish change to you can quickly escalate rapidly out of control. Of course you could massively subsidize all that green energy, but that means a lot of money flowing around, and certain people will be tempted to get their hands in the till, and massive corruption could the ensue which could change things like the government, the police force, and even the way private business is run. Or you could borrow the money for all those subsidies, until that massive debt comes suddenly crashing down on your head, or the government starts churning out money like mad (hyperinflation). Or lets say the EPA gets their wish, and shuts down 8% of our power plants. When the rolling blackouts hit, how many businesses will fail, and then how many more dependant on them will fail, and how many will wish to relocate out of the country, and now how many (more) unemployed are there, and will they be happy about that, and will they become restless (to put it mildly), and how will the government react to all that restlessness? And now it’s winter, and there is not enough power for heat, and people start dying, and they get restless, and the government reacts in it’s typical knee jerk fashion, and that produces even more consequences, etc And if the EPA gets it’s 230,000 more bureaucrats, might they get just a wee bit arrogent with all that power, how far will they take that? And if they do, how will the people react, and now how will the EPA and the rest of the government react, and just how far will that go? And this all started with a mere 8% drop in power.
In short, the primary effects, say, more expensive green energy, will almost always result in a chain of cause and effects, consequences, followed by consequences of the reaction to the consequences, and on and on, which will magnify the original effect many times over. Thus, merely saying that, say, green energy will raise your electric bill may be no where close to the truth. So this idea of “sensitivity” could be far more applicable to the remedy for climate change than to the climate itself.
And the real danger of climate change can be shown to be the danger of it’s cure, not it’s disease. And the cure may be so bad that even if the worst fears about climate change are true, they pale besides the danger of the cure.
Monckton of Brenchley said Multiplying the two gives the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of the loop gain 0.645, which is again absurdly high.
Lord Monckton, as you are un doubtfully aware, terms like “absurdly high” are not scientific. Would you care to present evidence that suggests that a loop gain of 0.645 (or implied amplification of 1.55) is ruled out by paleo climate analysis or present other empirical evidence of this amplification being “absurdly high”.
Henry@RJ
If you say there is no back- or re-radiation, then how do you explain that we can measure this re-radiated light, e.g. specific to CO2 coming back from the moon, see here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/644/1/551/64090.web.pdf?request-id=76e1a830-4451-4c80-aa58-4728c1d646ec
They measured this re-radiation from CO2 as it bounced back to earth from the moon. So the direction was sun-earth-moon-earth. Follow the green line in fig. 6, bottom. Note that it already starts at 1.2 um, then one peak at 1.4 um, then various peaks at 1.6 um and 3 big peaks at 2 um.
It all comes back in fig. 6 top.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
About the poster who linked to this site:
http://principia-scientific.org/publications/New_Concise_Experiment_on_Backradiation.pdf
First, is it really true that the IPCC uses a value of backradiation of around 300W? This fellow measured 300 coming up from the ground, but only around 60W coming down from the night sky. That means, IF the IPCC is actually using 300W as he claims, then it is no wonder we see no global warming, since their value of backradiation is five times too large, and thus the increase of backradiation must only be 20% of what they claim. If that is true, then the IPCC has been caught in a whopping big lie.
He does have a point that some of the radiation seen could be from hot air from convection, evaporation, and the like, and some of the actual backradiation could be from water vapor and clouds. I do not see that he has conclusively proved that ALL of the detected infrared is not backradiation from CO2, however.
If he is right that at least a significant portion of it comes from heated air from convection and evaporation, and backscatter from water vapor and clouds, then that leaves precious little left over for CO2, even if that CO2 doubles it would still be dwarfed by all that.
And if he is right that the IPCC is using a number five times too big for backradiation, AND much of the backradiation comes from non CO2 sources, then the amount caused by CO2 is vanishingly small, perhaps not even detectable.
And that is not even taking into account that the doubling of CO2’s backradiation increase may be logarithmic, not linear…
And there may be a way to measure whether increased CO2 causes increased backscatter without resorting to records of backscatter. There are ways now to measure areas where there are pockets of CO2, where the CO2 is greater than normal, and other areas where there is far less CO2. If you measure backscatter at night in the high CO2 and low CO2 areas, you should see significantly more backscatter in the high CO2 area, all else being equal. It might even be possible to find areas with enough difference in CO2 concentration that you can actually measure backscatter with a doubling of CO2. The one problem is “all else being equal”, that one could be a big problem. One would need to measure air temperature, pressure, humidity, presence of thin clouds, etc, all the way from the sensor and in a very high cone above it, up to perhaps 30km. One advantage even with that problem could be, if you do measure those things, and any one of them changes, and backscatter changes, you could find out what percentage of backscatter is caused by CO2, and what backscatter is caused by other factors, like say rising hot air, humidity, clouds etc.
And I will point out again that backscatter of infrared is only applicable at sea/ground level. That is where it could cause increased evaporation, which could increase the greenhouse gas water vapor (and the anti-warming cooling cloud cover), and where it could warm ice and melt it and raise the sea level. If it is not happening at sea/ground level, it is irrelevant.
“A word means what I want it to mean” – Humpty Dumpty
The concept of feedback is now sloshing around the climate arena, as shown by this and other threads. Feedback is a fairly rigorously defined idea in control theory, but is being used in a way that simply “clouds” the issue.
For example, the SB radiation law, clearly places a constraint on temperature rise with increasing temperature. This has been referred to as feedback, which it is not, it is simply a non-linear property of the system. One might be able to model it as feedback, but I would suggest that in the context of control theory, one would have to be rather careful. As another example, this thread follows from a staic analysis of climate, which may be useful if the climate went from one steady state to anaother. However, it seems clear that climate does not adopt a steady state and therefore what is important is the role of feedback in how the climate change.
If one is going to use control theory in analysing climate, one has to produce a mathematical model that it not only statically, but dynamically correct. A control system allows a variable to be controlled in the presence of time varying perturbations, a feature of control theory that seems to regularly ignored in climate.
Until the formalism of control theory is addressed, its use of control theory in climate science, will continue to be a mess and continue to contain elementary mathematical and physical misunderstandings. Perhaps climate scientists should read some textbooks on control theory, or even enrol in an undergraduate course. Alternatively, the Caligula method could be applied: “Utinam populus Romanus unam cervicem haberet!”, (although I am not suggesting that climate science should henceforth be conducted in Latin).
PS: To the editor. These types of threads contain some mathematics – it would be increadibly helpful if one could insert equations in a more elegent typeface into the comments. If one could “cut and paste” equations from, say MS Equation, it would make comments much easier.
PPS: I realise this is fighting talk, but the concepts can be explained quite simply, given an opportunity.
@Monckton of Brenchley
One thing one needs to know – indeed, THE thing one needs to know in the climate debate – is how much temperature change we shall get in response to a given change in radiative flux.
I would question that.
The figures I’ve seen show around 50% of the heat leaves the surface via evaporation. Almost all that water eventually forms clouds and the energy is lost.
So, for half the temperature flow from the surface, the question that seems most pertinent is:
“How much cloud shall we get in response to a given change in radiative flux“.
And of course, cloud itself is a massive affecter of radiative flux, so we can modify this to the apparently absurd:
“How much radiative flux we get in response to a given change in radiative flux“.
The conclusion I draw from this, is that the effects of solar radiation (at least the 50% that seems to be conducted from the surface by evaporation) is a dynamic system with massive feedbacks, whereas the question: “how much temperature change we shall get in response to a given change in radiative flux.” is a static system, a passive system.
So whilst you are right to argue feedbacks (the massive instabilities of high positive feedbacks), you then appear to dismiss them when considering the fundamental behaviour of the climate.
To my mind the atmosphere is not a static system as your focus on direct forcing would imply. And I would encourage you to cook more chips, because a pan of heated oil shows all the main characteristics of out atmosphere: it clearly divides into cells, the cells where there is a heat driver cycle as hot oil rises and falls. The analogy with the frontal systems of the climate are obvious. Air is heated (and moistened) so it rises. These rising air masses create low pressure, the air looses its energy and then falls creating high pressure zones. The system is one massive heat engine (or even cooling system): heat from the surface driving the cyclonic air movement and then being liberated at cloud level by presumably by IR emissions to space.
This is all a water-cloud-rain driven system. Sitting hear in Glasgow in the gloom of a rainy day, you may forgive me for thinking clouds affect our weather more than any other factor, but it seems to me that any model of the climate that ignores the dynamic heat flow of which clouds are an integral part, is a failed model.
But my real gripe, is that this static, forcing model of the climate which concentrates on: “THE thing one needs to know … (temperature) response to a given change in radiative flux”,… is the reason why climate “science” has for the last few decades focussed almost exclusively on this question of CO2 forcing. And because they ignore the dynamic (cloud) behaviour of the climate they have not only attempted squeeze 3.5C (modelled effective) warming into 1C of scientifically supportable CO2 warming, but they have totally ignored the importance of solar activity which works through its affects on clouds. Ignore the clouds, you ignore Svensmark!
I’m not saying that CO2 forcing is not an important question, but I do feel that the fundamental reason for these exaggerated claims of CO2 warming is precisely because people have thought this is “THE thing one needs to know” – it’s a one club solution – the only tool in their bag has been the 1C forcing, so its almost inevitable that they tried to make this one tool 1C fit the 3.5C (modelled) trend when it clearly is not the right tool, and in so doing have dismissed all the dynamic cloud and solar activity effects which arguably are far more important.
And just to “play” with the figures. If their typical estimate is 3.5C and you are claiming 1C, then the other dynamic effects surely account for the 20th century warming that caused them to imagine that 1C actual would lead to around 3.5C estimate. So, I think the scale of importance of “dynamic effects” is 2.5C … which is a lousy argument … but I hope you see the point.
davidmhoffer says:
(1) Doing the calculation with respect to radiative balances at the TOA does not mean one uses the temperature at the TOA. One uses the effective blackbody temperature of the earth as seen from space, which is what determines the outgoing radiation at the TOA.
(2) As has been discussed, what temperature rise one considers to be the zeroth order effect vs what one considers the effect after feedbacks is rather arbitrary. You are correct that the surface temperature rise is expected to be a little lower than the temperature rise computed at altitude because of the negative lapse rate feedback. However, it is unclear to me why including that feedback in the zeroth-order temperature change, while ignoring all the positive feedbacks, is more justified, especially since the lapse rate feedback involves so much of the same physics as the water vapor feedback that models that differ in the strength of each feedback individually have a much narrower spread for the net feedback due to the two effects, which is always positive. At the end of the day, what matters is the temperature rise after feedbacks are included, not the rise in the absence of feedbacks.
No…It is not re-enforcing your point at all. Your point is that somehow talking about an average temperature change is deceiving because it ignores the fact that the temperature change is non-uniform and you think most of the temperature change will occur in places where it will only have a small negative effect or be beneficial. I am pointing out that, in fact, the average is already weighted very strongly by locations that will experience below-average temperature change, including some like the oceans where we don’t even live. Hence, looking at the average in many ways underestimates the effects that will be actually be seen.
Your statement that I have not responded is incorrect. See here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/27/monckton-on-pulling-planck-out-of-a-hat/#comment-754595 and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/27/monckton-on-pulling-planck-out-of-a-hat/#comment-755311
In summary, I have shown that:
(1) Your mathematical calculation was seriously incorrect and that for a logarithmic dependence of temperature on concentration, the decrease in the temperature increment with each successive 120 ppm CO2 increment is much, much slower than you claimed it to be. For example, you had calculated that the temperature increment in going from 760ppm to 880ppm is only 1/16 (or 6.25%) of that going from 280 to 400 ppm whereas the correct value is that it is still over 40% of going from 280 to 400 ppm
(2) Given the general trends of increasing CO2 emissions (that you apparently want to do nothing to reduce), it is not at all unreasonable to expect linear or somewhat superlinear temperature increases.
The issue is that the IPCC/Hansen/Global Warming Theory calculations do not add up.
They long ago decided that 3.7 to 4.3 W/m2 (or any number really) of forcing/radiation slow-down by GHGs resulted in 3.0C of net warming and they have been trying to justify it ever since.
That even means when newer measurements and better understanding of temperature changes per W/m2 of forcing and better understanding of the limited nature of the feedbacks occur, they still stick to the 3.0C even if that means ignoring Grade 3 math rules.
They just lack the desire to do any kind of self-examination so it is up to us to re-do the math again for them. Eventually, it has to take hold.
To Roy Weiler: The timing of your post accusing me of “hand-waving” was unfortunate: for I had just posted a lengthy and surely quite detailed indication of why T/(4F) is a respectable and accurate form of the first differential of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, a point which – as far as I could understand the extremely hostile noises being made by a blogger at another site – she disagreed with. It would be helpful if posters on this blog were less instinctually discourteous.
To Septic Matthew: Yes, indeed, it is as simple as you say: the two forms of the differential are indeed identical for the reason you mention, which makes it all the more puzzling that a blogger at another site, whom several people on this thread seem to think is good at math, seemed to challenge that point.
She also challenged my use of Kimoto’s eq. (18), but, as I and several others have pointed out, nothing rests on this: if one omitted the non-radiative transports from the surface because the SB equation treats radiative transports only, then the resultant climate sensitivity would still be around 1 K, so – in the context in which I was using Kimoto’s equation – it simply doesn’t make any difference. A competent mathematician would have spotted that fact at once and stopped wasting any more time on it.
Also, a competent mathematician would have understood that, since Kiehl & Trenberth say their value for the surface radiative flux is the blackbody value, implying that the used the SB equation to calculate it from the surface temperature, they are also implying that there is at present a blackbody relationship between temperature and flux at the surface. If that link between the two exists – and that is what K&T are (to my mind wrongly) saying, then it is the surface value of the Planck parameter that will determine climate sensitivity, even though the correct altitude at which to do the calculation is the characteristic-emission altitude. For, as Dick Lindzen points out in his recent lecture to the American Chemical Society, flux imbalances up in the atmosphere match those at the surface.
The fact is that Lucia has gotten far more of her math wrong in this than I have – and in any event, as several people have told her publicly as well as privately, in conducting herself in such a visibly malevolent fashion she is not doing herself or mathematics any favors. She has not kept matters in perspective. She had at first accused me of using the surface value of the Planck parameter for what she called “further evaluations”, and became very bad-tempered when I demonstrated to her that, of course, I had done no such thing. So, because nothing whatsoever rested on whether or not Kimoto’s equation (18) was right, there is really no point in screeching at me about it: she should get on to Kimoto and see if she can persuade him to publish a correction.
To Venter and Legatus: Thank you both for keeping matters firmly in perspective. My commentary does indeed demonstrate by several distinct methods that using the IPCC’s own methodology indicates a low climate sensitivity. That is the central message. I am not warranting that the IPCC is right in how it does things: but I have demonstrated, I think, that if it does things the way it does things then there is a statable case that climate sensitivity is not very high.
For instance, there has been about 3 W/m2 of radiative forcings from greenhouse gases since 1750, and we take back around 1 W/m2 to allow for non-GHG anthropogenic effects, chiefly particulate aerosols. So that’s 2 W/m2 of net anthropogenic forcings since 1750, and there has been 0.8 K of warming since then. So the transient climate sensitivity over that period is (5.35 ln 2)(0.8/2) = 1.5 K, or less if one assumes that not all of the warming since 1750 was manmade. Transient sensitivity is not equilibrium sensitivity, of course, but since equilibrium does not arrive for 1000-3000 years it’s the transient sensitivity we need to worry about – or, rather, on these figures, don’t need to worry about.
A similar analysis since 1950 produces much the same result.
Or you can observe that since 1850 the maximum rate of global warming sustained for more than a decade was at a rate equivalent to 1.6 K/century. Given no warming in the first decade of this century, and assuming that what has been the maximum supra-decadal warming rate suddenly becomes the average warming rate, you still only get 1.5 K warming over this century.
Or you can simply extrapolate the warming rate since 1950 (0.7 K) over 100 years instead of 61 years. Once again, warming of around 1 K over the century is indicated. Not quite the same thing as climate sensitivity at first blush: but the IPCC projects that CO2 concentration will double compared with today by the end of the century.
So there you have four distinct back-of-the-envelope determinations of climate sensitivity, none of them definitive – I made that point in my Commentary – but all of them tending to indicate that climate sensitivity is likely to be low. When I gave these arguments recently to a particle physicist from CERN, he said nothing at the time: but the next morning his wife came down to breakfast and said, “He came back and looked up what you’d told him, and woke me up at midnight to tell me he thought you were right.” And they’d both been quite annoyed the previous year when they’d attended a lecture I’d given at the World Federation of Scientists’ annual conference on climate sensitivity.
Doesn’t mean I am right, of course: but it does suggest that I’m not quite as obviously, completely wrong as some people seem so very anxious to suggest. I’m a layman doing my best because a well-placed part of the climate-science community is bent, and the damage their crookedness is causing is very costly, particularly to poor people. We need to get science back on to a proper footing; and, until we do, I’ll be doing my best to check whether what the usual suspects are telling us is true.
Legatus: I don’t think people understand what Christopher Monckton is trying to do here.
He is simply trying to find out if, using the math (correct or incorrect) and data (real or imaginary) that the IPPC accepts as true, we can come up with the climate sensitivity that they claim.
I am glad that you wrote that. I was going to post it this morning, and I see that Lord Monckton has affirmed it: To Venter and Legatus: Thank you both for keeping matters firmly in perspective. My commentary does indeed demonstrate by several distinct methods that using the IPCC’s own methodology indicates a low climate sensitivity. That is the central message. I am not warranting that the IPCC is right in how it does things: but I have demonstrated, I think, that if it does things the way it does things then there is a statable case that climate sensitivity is not very high. .
Lord Monckton, please let us know how your revised commentary is received.
“However, 30% of the Sun’s radiation is reflected harmlessly back to space by clouds, snow, sparkling sea surfaces,”
Harmlessly is a relative term. Sometimes you want more sunlight at the surface and sometimes you don’t.
Be that as it may, 30% is a gross estimate and on the low side of all estimates. The fact of the matter is that we know a lot less about the earth’s average albedo than we do its average temperature. This is critical because a 1% change in global average albedo has about the same “forcing” as a doubling of CO2.
From wikedpedia:
There are two great attractors vis climate on the earth. Both have to do with the water cycle and whether the liquid or solid phase is dominant on the surface. If the surface were entirely ocean (ocean has a very low albedo) the surface temperature would average 27C and if it all presents as ice then it would be -40C.
This is ALL due to albedo!!! Imagine that. Here we are quibbling over whether a doubling of non-condensing greenhouse gas engenders something nearer to 1C or 5C temperature rise when changes in albedo can drive the temperature through a range of almost 70C.
Ice has a positive feedback that makes more ice and water has a positive feedback that makes more water. Currently the planet is in a no-man’s land teetering back and forth from ice cover growing to water cover growing in a cycle some 100,000 years or so in duration.
The usual state of affairs for the earth is no permanent ice cover even at the poles. It’s a water world and tends to stay that way. But there are perturbations that occassionally give ice the upper hand for millions of years. These are likely “perfect storm” perturbations (IMO) where there’s a grand minimum in solar activity, Milankovich cycle at the peak point for least summer ice melt in hemisphere with most land mass, and a supervolcano erupting all at the same time.
Anyhow, there has never been a “runaway greenhouse” in the earth’s history and anthropogenic CO2 can’t possibly get atmpspheric content anywhere near as high as nature herself raised it in the very long warm epics when temperate forests were growing in Antarctica. However, there HAVE been runaway deep freezes where the earth was either completely or very nearly covered in ice. Given that the earth has been in a moderate ice age for the past several million years it seems pretty friggin’ stupid to worry about too much warming. The Milankovich orbital parameters are approaching the peak point favoring warmer winters and cooler summers (the situation that favors glacial advance) in the northern hemisphere, possibly worse is that sun appears to have just exited 50 of the most active years in the solar observation record and is entering what appears to be a Dalton or Maunder Minimum (both of which coincided with very cold decades or centuries). All we need to complete the perfect storm is something like a supervolcano and BOOYAH say hello to snowball earth for 10 million years.
If anthropogenic CO2 has some small surface warming effect then, as an engineer, I call that a greater margin of safety against the real climate threat – the ice age.
Monckton
Nonsense. There incorrect application of differential calculus is not the only error in the derivaiton of Kimoto. It is not the only one I discussed. Those who read and understood the first post are aware that the derivation contains an unstated assumption about the functional form for back-radiation (and likely for convection and evapo-transpiration. The unstated assumption about back radiation is the more momentous issue.
However, though I have invited you to state all the assumption in the derivation, you have consistently refused to do so.
The discussion of the error in differentiation in the final post was included merely because you insist that you (or Kimoto) have differentiated correctly, when in fact, you have not done so. Moreover, you provide as evidence the differential in Hansen, which in fact represents differentiation of a different function.
Others can decide how to interpret the fact that you are reluctant to answer when someone requests you state the assumptions in an, they may decide how to interpret the fact that you do not recognize a very simple error in taking a derivative, they may decide how to interpret the fact that you defend your error when your error has been brought to your attention, and that your defense includes insistence that anyone would obtain your result if they referred to a text on differential calculus.
With all due respect, I would suggest that at least some readers who do not know calculus or heat transfer suspect that even now, you still do not understand that derivation of (18) contains several important assumption with little basis in physics, and the magnitude of the errors introduced by these assumptions is non-trivial. Many readers who know calculus and heat transfer likely do more than suspect this.
Lucia, was there a problem with my note at September 30, 2011 at 7:07 pm.
I went to your blog, and that post of mine above seems to address the only mathematical problem that you pointed to, that I found. Since Kimoto used the same relationship (assuming for now that I am right) as Hansen (cited above) why the critique of Kimoto but not Hansen?
Joel Shore;
(1) Your mathematical calculation was seriously incorrect and that for a logarithmic dependence of temperature on concentration>>>
REPLY
I agreed to use the numbers that you calculated and asked you to propose a feedback mechanism which would result in linear temperature increases as a result. You did not, and you have not.
Joel Shore;
(2) Given the general trends of increasing CO2 emissions (that you apparently want to do nothing to reduce), it is not at all unreasonable to expect linear or somewhat superlinear temperature increases.
REPLY
You are implying that CO2 increases are accelerarting which the record does NOT show, they are in fact nearly linear. That said, you have once again evaded the question. I asked you to propose a feedback mechanism that would result in linear temperature increases versus logarithmic effects of CO2. By insinuating the CO2 levels are accelerating, you’ve ducked the question, which has nothing to do with them acclerating or decelerating. The question was, what possible feedback mechanism could result in a linear temperature increase in the face of logarithmic effects of CO2?
Joel Shore;
No…It is not re-enforcing your point at all. Your point is that somehow talking about an average temperature change is deceiving because it ignores the fact that the temperature change is non-uniform and you think most of the temperature change will occur in places where it will only have a small negative effect or be beneficial. I am pointing out that, in fact, the average is already weighted very strongly by locations that will experience below-average temperature change, including some like the oceans where we don’t even live. Hence, looking at the average in many ways underestimates the effects that will be actually be seen.>>>
REPLY
Read the whole thing again Joel. you can’t keep moving the yard stick from one place to another. Actual observations BTW, back me up. Look at either NASA/GISS or HadCrut broken down by latitude and by season and you will see that the distribution is what I described. You can argue as to why, but you can’t argue with the results. Summers have increased in temp the least, winters the most. Tropics the least, high latitudes…well almost… the high mids actually show more than the arctic zones by a bit. But over all, the data doesn’t support you.
davidmhoffer says:
No…The rate of increase of CO2 levels in the atmosphere has about doubled over the last 40 years: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/co2-shame/
Maybe I don’t understand your question. I have assumed that you mean, “How can temperature increase linearly with time when the effect of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic?” And, the answer is by having CO2 concentration increase more rapidly than linearly with time, which is what it has been doing.
If you are asking another question, could you please make it clear what that question is? (I am not sure why you are hung up on feedbacks changing the dependence. Feedbacks are expected to increase the climate sensitivity but aren’t expected to change the logarithmic dependence on concentration, which is why one talks of climate sensitivity in terms of a doubling of CO2 levels.
davidmhoffer says:
What is it that I have said that the data does not support? You haven’t cited anything I said that is contradicted by the data. I agree that the higher latitudes are generally warming more than the tropics and am willing to believe you on the seasonal stuff. However, it is also true that the land areas of warming more than the oceans…and everything I have said about the relative weight that the land areas and the various parts of the globe are given in computing the average global temperature is correct.
We both agree that representing the temperature change by one number is an oversimplification. However, you seem to want to focus solely on the way you think the one number overstates the problem and ignore the ways in which it understates the problem (and also the ways in which the overstatement is really not that great…since one of my points is that the polar regions are given quite small weight in an average over the earth’s surface and the tropics are given a quite large weight simply because of the relative areas that they occupy on the globe).
Septic Matthew says:
Kimoto did not use the same relation as Hansen. Hansen took the derivative of his function correctly; Kimoto did not. The difference between Hansen and Kimoto’s function and their derivatives is addressed in my recent blog post.
Joel Shore;
No…The rate of increase of CO2 levels in the atmosphere has about doubled over the last 40 years: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/co2-shame/>>>
You’re using Tamino as a reference? LOL.
Here’s the link (scroll down to mid page) for the OFFICIAL records from Muana Loa.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html
If we use 278 PPM for 1920, and guesstimate from the graph we get:
1920 278
1960 310
1970 325
1990 355
2010 390
So:
1920 to 1960 ~ 0.75 ppm/yr
1960 to 1990 ~ 1.50 ppm/yr
1970 to 1990 ~ 1.50 ppm/yr
1990 to 2010 ~ 1.75 ppm/yr
40 years being since 1970, looks roughly linear to me, and the same from the ten years before that. Where’s the rate of increase that has doubled? I clicked the link to Tamino’s article and skimmed through it to the part where he decides to calculate the year over year increase based on a single month from each year. Why would one choose a single month from each year on record at Muana Loa (where he says he gets his data) when ALL the months are published? Why use only 1/12 of the available data?
Can we say BUSTED?
David Hoffer says:
“I clicked the link to Tamino’s article and skimmed through it to the part where he decides to calculate the year over year increase based on a single month from each year. Why would one choose a single month from each year on record at Muana Loa (where he says he gets his data) when ALL the months are published? Why use only 1/12 of the available data?”
Excellent point. Here is the past 80 years of December temperatures. No change in trend at all.
Lucia,
thanks.
You have a lot of active threads, and I didn’t see which one was relevant.
Kimoto/Monckton (seem to) assume that two terms are sufficiently small that they can be neglected. As I understand your request for a complete list of assumptions, you want them to say so explicitly and justify it.
Lucia,
You wrote this in your comment # 82711 (if I have your numbering down pat): “Don
Do you have in mind an estimation of climate sensitivity for a doubling of C02?
Lucia “My thoughts are it’s in the lower end of the range discussed by the IPCC. That said, I do not have extremely strong technical reasons for this, and have never claimed to have any. I think I have some technical reasons– but they are not of the sort that permit any tight bound on the magnitude of climate sensitivity.””
It seems that you have drawn a conclusion compatible with Lord Monckton, but have a different set of intuitions about which terms in the various derivations to neglect/downweight/ignore/omit.
I have no quarrel with that. I think that all of the derivations are based on counterfactual assumptions (equilibrium, etc.) and so none of the results can be expected to have the hoped for accuracy. But to assail Lord Monckton for lack of rigor, and then to assert intuitively a conclusion that is so concordant with his, while not telling us any of your intuitions, strikes me as discordant.
Since we can’t even know for sure that the climate sensitivity is independent of temperature, it seems to me that you are quarreling over minor details when the biggest uncertainty is ignored.
davidmhoffer says:
I am afraid it is you who are busted here. Your value for 1960 is quite a bit off…The actual yearly average was 317 ppm ( ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt ). (I also think your 1920 value might be somewhat low, but we’ll ignore that.) Using this correction (and the actual values for the other years too…although you got those mainly okay), we get:
1920 to 1960 ~ 1.0 ppm/yr
1960 to 1990 ~ 1.25 ppm/yr
1970 to 1990 ~ 1.4 ppm/yr
1990 to 2010 ~ 1.8 ppm/yr
So, the rate of increase has been pretty steadily rising. Your method is a bit clunky (e.g., averaging over such large periods and not consistent time intervals) and if you went down further on the very page that you linked to ( http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html ), you would have seen that they look at the increase over time 10 year intervals. Their 1960-1970 value about 0.85 ppm and their 2000-2010 value is right about at 2.0 ppm, in perfect agreement with my statement (and tamino’s analysis) showing that “the rate of increase of CO2 levels in the atmosphere has about doubled over the last 40 years”!
So, your very own source contradicts you and supports me and tamino on the very page that you linked to! Go figure!!!
As I have shown, this is irrelevant, since one gets the same result doing it other ways (such as using the average value for the year). In fact, I am rather curious why you would think it would make such a significant difference? This alone should have been a clue to you that your analysis was likely flawed!
Smokey:
Thanks for the completely irrelevant link! That was…ah…very useful.
davidmhoffer,
Just to be clear about which graph on the page I am referring to, it is this one: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.pdf
davidmhoffer says:
October 1, 2011 at 8:53 pm
Joel Shore;
I clicked the link to Tamino’s article and skimmed through it to the part where he decides to calculate the year over year increase based on a single month from each year. Why would one choose a single month from each year on record at Muana Loa (where he says he gets his data) when ALL the months are published? Why use only 1/12 of the available data?
Can we say BUSTED?
Indeed you are! Tamino uses all the data.
Joel Shore says:
“Thanks for the completely irrelevant link!”
That completely relevant link was in response to David Hoffer’s comment: “Why would one choose a single month from each year on record at Muana Loa (where he says he gets his data) when ALL the months are published? Why use only 1/12 of the available data?” Tamino cherry-picked one particular month, so I did too in order to expose his shenanigans.
You just don’t like it because of the anti-alarmist implications.
And please stop referring to that clown tamino. He’s irrelevant in this debate. If you can’t make your own arguments without tamino as a crutch it’s an admission that you can’t think for yourself.
Some people seem to be confused by Tamino’s method. So I went to his site, held my nose, and took a look. I say “held my nose” because Tamino censors his site, and that always makes his “science” stink … but on the other hand he’s usually a pretty reliable mathematician.
David Hoffer claims that Tamino has chosen a single month of the year to use for his analysis. This is not true. Actually, Tamino uses all of the data in a monthly “year-over-year” type analysis.
Rather than taking yearly averages of the monthly data and then getting the year-by-year change from that, Tamino is looking at finer-grained detail. To do this, for EACH MONTH IN THE RECORD he subtracts the corresponding value from 12 months previous … which gives him a rather jagged curve. He then rams a straight line though it, an ugly procedure, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that his graph contains each and every month.
Why does all this have to be so hard?
w.
Thanx Willis, I never clicked on tamino’s blog on principle. I replied to Joel Shore’s response. Thank you for explaining how tamino did it.
Willis; Phil;
I didn’t read all the way through Tamino’s article, I stopped at yearly month over month. I stand corrected.
Joel;
Thanks for the link to the more detailed page. Based on that, starting in 1970 and going in 10 year invrements we get roughly:
1960 to 70 ~0.85
1970 to 80 ~1.3
1980 to 90 ~1.6
1990 to 2000 ~1.5
2000 to 2010 ~2.0
One can cherry pick which intervals to compare I suppose. But I never meant to argue that what the rate of increase was. My point, if you go back to the original discussion, is that one cannot propose a feedback mechanism to a a “forcing” that is logarithmic that results in a linear temperature response. Your reply to me was based on the assumption that I was ignoring the accelerating increases in CO2 which would serve to counter act the logarithmic effects of CO2. In order for this to be the case, the increases in CO2 would have to be exponential in the same orger of magnitude that CO2 is logarithmic. We can see from the results from the various links that from 1970 to 2000 the levels were nearly linear, but there were sharp upticks 60-70 and 00-10.
So, I’ll agree to “roughly double” over the last 40 years (very roughly), but that doesn’t answer the original question that I posed.
What feedback mechanism could result in linear or exponential increaeses in temperature based on the logarithmic forcing effects of CO2? Do be specific, a linear increase in CO2?
davidmhoffer says:
Well, now that we are on the same page regarding how to compute things and what the data for CO2 concentration shows, let’s look at the numbers: Over the last 40 years, the rate of CO2 increase (dC/dt where C is concentration of CO2 and t is time) has roughly doubled. The logarithmic dependence of temperature on concentration T = A*log(C/C_0) means that the derivative dT/dC is proportional to 1/C (the constant of proportionality being irrelevant for the purposes here).
Now, what we are interested in is the slope of the curve of T vs t, i.e., dT/dt. Since
dT/dt = (dC/dt)*(dT/dC), we can compare this slope in 1970 to what it is now using the fact that concentration has gone from ~326ppm to 390ppm and dC/dt has roughly doubled. What we get is an increase in the slope by a factor of 1.67. So, over the last 40 years we would expect that the increasing rate of CO2 increase has more than kept up with the decrease in dT/dC with increasing concentration to produce a significantly-faster than linear rise in temperature due to the CO2 forcing. (The actual temperature rise seen has complications due to additional forcings that are present plus natural variation…although it certainly exhibits a dramatic change between 1970 and now, although that change was mainly in the early part of the record.)
What will happen in the future depends on assumptions for the growth rate of C with time…but it is certainly not difficult to imagine scenarios in which such a faster than linear rise continues and, in fact, it may be difficult to contrive scenarios where it doesn’t…at least under the assumption that we don’t make any attempt to regulate CO2 emissions.
Note: This all has nothing to do with feedback mechanisms. As I have said, to the first approximation at least, what feedbacks do is increase the coefficient…They don’t change the dependence.
Actually, I think it is pretty easy to say to first order what the criterion for a linear rise is: Currently, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere C are increasing at a rate of ~0.5% per year, which means that because of the logarithmic dependence of temperature on concentration, dT/dC ~ 1/C is decreasing by about 0.5% per year. So, as long as the rate of CO2 concentration increase is faster than this, you will get super-linear increases. So far, the rate of CO2 concentration increase seems to be proportional to our emissions, so this means that as long as our emissions increase by 0.5% per year, dT/dt will be linear. If our emissions increase by less than that, it will be sublinear and if they increase by more than that, it will be superlinear.
This holds as long as you don’t go out too far into the future (i.e., as long as the approximation that C is increasing by about 0.5% per year is a reasonable one).
To Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Re. Monckton’s letter to the journal Remote Sensing
Your idea here is all very well to show that, using the IPCC’s math and figures, their number for climate forcing is not correct, however, there may be an easier way, especially when we are originally talking about a journal called remote SENSING. That is, simply show that the SENSING that the IPCC’s math uses cannot be true.
First, one needs to ask, has the IPCC actually done any remote sensing? That is to say, is this entirely a theoretical exercise and not based on any actual observation at all? Regardless of whether the IPCC’ math is correct or not, if they have no actual observational evidence to plug into their math, it is irrelevant. Therefore, it would be wise to point out where the IPCC is basing their conclusions on reality, and where on fiction. If they have not done any actual remote sensing, the journal remote sensing should reject it as fiction.
Second, let us see if the blackbody flux of 390 W m–2 as more or less correct. When I look here http://principia-scientific.org/publications/New_Concise_Experiment_on_Backradiation.pdf , the only site I know of currently that has done an actual direct obserevation of thus flux (you know, remote sensing), I see the max reported flux as 336W. That is close enough to 390W to expect that the average of “total radiative forcing from the five principal greenhouse gases (H2O, CO2, CH4, O3, and N2O)” given as “~101 W m–2” should also be observed. However, when I look at this link, the direct observation is actually 65.96W. Thus, when the surface is fairly close to the 390W the IPCC accepts, the actual measured atmospheric flux downward is only some two thirds that. Thus strongly suggests that the IPCC’s number for atmospheric flux is fictitional. A journal called remote SENSING should be more inclined to numbers based on actual sensing in place than numbers that are largely theoretical. For that matter, any reasonable person must now ask themselves the question, ‘who are you going to believe, us college professors or your lying eyes?’. Conclusion so far, even if we accept the IPCC’s sensitivity, their total temperature rise for the planet is now down from 3C to 2C since the radiative flux that it is based on has been actually observed as only 2/3rds of what they claim it is.
But let us now say that we accept the IPCC’s number of “~101 W m–2”, even though it does not coorespond even closely to actual remote sensing. How do we know that all of that 101W are backscattering, absorbtion and redirection downward of infrared radiation originally emitted by the surface? Do not heated objects, objects that may be heated by methods other than absorbing infrared radiation, also emit infrared radiation? So, if the surface is heated by the sun, might there be some “evapo-transpiration” and “thermal convection”? If there is, we now have rising hot water and rising hot air. These, being hot, will also emit infrared radiation, will they not? So, that 101W we say is all backscatter by greenhouse gasses actually must consist of at least some gasses that did NOT receive their heat from absorbing infrared, but by other means. That means that only a portion of the infrared we are detecting (or, in the IPCC”s case, not bothering to) is caused by backscatter, a signifigent portion of it is simply caused by heated water and air heated by other means than radiative flux. How much, then is actually backscatter, and how much simply a lot of hot air, literally?
To sum up:
Unless the IPCC has actually done some remote sensing, the journal remote sensing should reject their ideas as fiction.
Real world remote sensing reports vastly different numbers than the IPCC accepts as true, so different that the IPCC numbers are extremely suspect.
The detected radiative flux cannot be all from backscatter, but must also be from other sources, so an increase of backscatter may only be a percentage of what they claim it to be.
My conclusion is that the actual increase of temperature from a given increase of CO2 will be lucky to be half of what the IPCC claims, even if their claimed climate sensitivity is completely correct.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 30, 2011 at 3:36 pm
[ . . . ] The correct approach is dispassionate, [ . . . ]
——————
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley,
Yes.
Nor is it negative or positive in any sense or context. It is stark and yet because of that benevolent.
John
Joel Shore;
We’re getting somewhere now!
But too much detail and not on topic (per se) and so I’ll send you something directly in a day or two in order to facilitate the discussion. I trust your email address hasn’t changed?
Legatus:
(1) The IPCC doesn’t itself do scientific investigations. Their role is to summarize and synthesize the peer-reviewed scientific results from the literature.
(2) Speaking of fiction, that is the category under which you should file anything by Nasif Nahle (and Principia Scientific). Seriously, you can’t just accept anything you find on the internet at face value. Nasif, in particular, has shown that he can’t even understand the most basic concepts such as the need for the geometrical factor of 4 to convert between the solar constant and the radiative intensity in W/m^2 impinging on the earth. Principia Scientific is the “Slaying the Sky Dragons” organization which specializes in deciminating complete nonsense.
(3) Remote sensing is a well-developed scientific and technological field. If there were very basic surprises such as those regarding the amount of radiation emanating from the earth’s surface, don’t you think they would have been discovered by now? I recommend that you approach this with a little bit of common sense.
david: I guess I am confused then about what the topic is that you want to discuss…but, yes, the e-mail address you used before is still good.
Legatus, I’d never read Nahle’s piece, although I’d interacted with him on a listserve and found his theories … well, let me call them out of the ordinary. So I went to take a look at the site you recommended. He says he’s measuring longwave radiation. Here’s his description:
OK, pointing his “radiometer” upwards at night he measures 62 W/m2. That seems way too low to me. So I figure I’ll take a look at his equipment.
To my surprise, I find it described as a “solarimeter”, with the following specs:
So what he is using is an accumulating solar measurement tool. It is designed to collect information, not on longwave “greenhouse” radiation, but on instantaneous and cumulative sunshine.
Using a solarimeter to measure the IR from the night sky? Wrong tool. Color me unimpressed … people who deny downwelling longwave radiation (DLR) are off the rails. Google can provide a host of real measurements from around the planet. I analyzed the DLR measurements from the TAO buoys here, they average about 420 W/m2. Nasif Nahle is blowing smoke, Legatus. Leave him alone.
w.
The blogger who has said both here and elsewhere that I erred in including non-radiative transports in differentiating a radiative-transfer equation made at least the following errors in her math:
Error 1: If I was wrong, then so was she, for she implicitly included non-radiative transports in that differential throughout her first email to me, where she discussed it at length without mentioning that I had included two non-radiative transports in a radiative-transfer differential. Instead, she went on to do exactly the same herself, discussing at some length whether I had used “+” in that differentiation when I should have used “-“.
Error 2: Once she had made the mistake of alleging that I had used an incorrect sign she did not admit it or apologize for it. In subsequent material she shifted her ground and began accusing me of having taken the allegedly erroneous step that she had herself made in her first email in overlooking the two non-radiative terms in the radiative-transfer differential and concentrating, inappositely, on whether a wrong sign had been used.
Error 3: Also in her first email she wrote, “This value of delta-T/delta-F is then identified as the Plank [sic] Constant.” Here and in several other places, she spells “Planck” as “Plank” or even “plank”. This oft-repeated error bespeaks unfamiliarity with the territory, and with the great physicist whose blackbody law was the basis of Boltzmann’s theoretical demonstration of the equation that his professor Stefan (the only Slovene after whom an equation is named) had derived empirically. In passing, I note that on her own blog she indulged without any comment a far greater error than the one she had alleged against me, in that one of her commenters (a climate campaigner with a shaky knowledge of math) had said the fundamental equation of radiative transfer models only blackbodies. This is admittedly a widespread error: the Astronomer Royal is among others who have made it. But, of course, one of the four parameters in the equation is that for emissivity, so that the equation can model blackbodies such as the Sun [emissivity 1] and (with respect to long-wave radiation) the Earth; whitebodies [emissivity 0]; and all the graybodies in between [emissivity on the interval (0, 1)].
Error 4: No, I did not “identify” the differential in question as the “Plank” constant, nor even as the Planck constant. This is perhaps the central math error in the blogger’s collection. In my Commentary for Remote Sensing, I wrote: “If the surface radiative flux were indeed the blackbody flux of 390 W m–2, then by differentiation of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer the implicit value of the Planck parameter would be …”. I try (at least some of the time) to point out errors gently, politely, and as indirectly as possible.
Error 5: The blogger compounds Error 4 by saying, in one of her comments: “Monckton’s calculation is based on the premise that those numbers are true.” Actually, as the text quoted from my Commentary under Error 4 surely makes plain, my calculation is based on the premise that Kiehl & Trenberth’s numbers are false, but that if they were true (note the protasis) then the implicit value of the Planck parameter would be (note the apodosis). This is a conditional, not a premise, and, in mathematics, which depends upon and is the highest expression of logic, such distinctions are far from trivial.
Error 6: The blogger further compounds Error 4 by saying, again in her first email, that this particular implicit – and implicitly erroneous – “Plank” parameter ” is used in what she called “further evaluations” by me. Yet all but one of the other 14 climate sensitivities ~1 K that I had sketched out in the Commentary plainly did not depend on any knowledge of the value of the Planck parameter, and in that single instance I had correctly used the IPCC’s value for the Planck parameter.
Error 7: The blogger yet further compounds Error 4 by heading one of her blog postings “Monckton’s Planck parameter …”, and adding something about things being pulled out of a hat. There is a further reference to a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat in one of her comments, and several to the notion that Monckton can be relied upon to get things wrong, writes like Barbara Cartland [I should be so lucky] etc., etc. However, since I had not in any way adopted or endorsed the implicit value of the Planck parameter that I had deduced in Kiehl & Trenberth’s paper, to call it “Monckton’s” Planck parameter is less than reasonable, especially as I had written both in my original Commentary and in my first email in answer to her question about the allegedly incorrect sign in the differential that I regarded the IPCC’s value as correct.
Error 8: Even after I had explicitly told the blogger, twice, that I accepted the IPCC’s value of the Planck parameter, she headed one of three successive and inappropriately-worded attacks on me with the words “Monckton’s Planck parameter …”. The spelling was right this time, but her error in calling it my Planck parameter does not appear to have been a mere inadvertence. As far as I can see on her blog, she has still not gotten around to telling her readers the central fact in this affair – that I accept, and stated not only in my Commentary for Remote Sensing but also in my first email in response to hers – that the IPCC’s value of the Planck parameter is correct. From this it follows that nothing of the slightest consequence follows from my following Kimoto in not following Kiehl and Trenberth in deriving the surface outgoing radiative flux solely from the surface temperature, when that temperature is influenced not only by radiative but also by non-radiative transports, and is also influenced not by surface radiation, with which it cannot therefore be rigidly liked via the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, but by radiation at the characteristic-emission altitude, about 5 km above mean sea level.
Error 9: The blogger appears not to have kept in mind the atmospheric mechanism that operates here, which is that an increase in radiative flux at the characteristic-emission altitude raises that altitude; and, since the temperature lapse-rate is constant, the effect is to increase atmospheric temperature all the way down to the surface. At one point she seems to imply that temperature causes radiative flux, when it is of course the other way about. Kiehl & Trenberth were incorrect to assume that one can apply the fundamental equation of radiative transfer strictly at the Earth’s surface to derive outgoing radiative flux from it, so as (again, proceeding in the wrong direction) to derive a value for surface outgoing radiation from the measured value for surface temperature, not least because that measured value is dependent not only on the radiative transport but also on the non-radiative transports from the surface. Evaporation, for instance, cools the surface, and does so at a rate thrice that in the models. Kimoto, whom I had cited, was doing his best to make some allowance for Kiehl & Trenberth’s error here.
Error 10: The blogger seems unaware, though my Commentary mentioned it, that even if one makes the mistake of trying to take a differential of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer at the Earth’s surface, one must most certainly make proper allowance for latitudinal variation. Though that great equation models temperature in such a way that zonal-mean temperatures derived using the equation sum remarkably to within 0.5 K absolute of the global value that the equation determines, the same is not true of the differential. At the characteristic-emission altitude, for instance, the IPCC’s value 0.313 K/W/m2 for the Planck parameter is 17% greater than the differential, precisely to allow for latitudinal variation. I have recently revisited my own calculations, using 30 years of absolute mid-troposphere temperatures kindly made available by the eminent Roy Spencer and John Christy of UAH, and my latest result, applied to 67 distinct zones of latitude, is 0.313 K/W/m2. The IPCC, therefore, has this one right as far as I can see: and I wish they had explained themselves a lot more clearly on this and many other matters, rather than burying their value of the Planck parameter in a footnote on p. 631 of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. But Kiehl & Trenberth – even if they had been right to use the fundamental equation of radiative transfer at the surface in the way they did – were certainly wrong in not having made any allowance for latitudinal variation, which would produce an appreciably smaller value for outgoing radiative flux than the 390 K they show in their celebrated diagram. The blogger did not notice this, and instead stated – entirely incorrectly – that I had accepted Kiehl & Trenberth’s values, even after I had told her plainly that I did not. Frankly, very little rides on whether I, as an interested layman, am right about Kiehl & Trenberth’s implicit surface value of the Planck parameter. But quite a lot rides on their much-cited diagram. Would it not be a better use of the blogger’s time to check the math where it matters, and where major conclusions are drawn from it, and not where it simply doesn’t matter, and where I drew no conclusion from it at all except that if Kiehl & Trenberth were right then a low climate sensitivity would be expected?
Error 11: At one point in the blogger’s numerous comments, it seems plain that she was at that time unaware that expressing the differential delta-T/delta-F in the form T/(4F) is entirely correct. Indeed, it is derivable with very little difficulty from the functionally-identical form deployed (albeit with a typographical error) by Hansen in Eq. (13) of his pioneering paper of 1984, and is commonly used throughout the literature on climate sensitivity. Whether one should include the non-radiative transports, as I followed Kimoto in doing, as a way of correcting for Kiehl & Trenberth’s error is a separate question. Aside from that point, the form of the differential we were using is correct.
Error 12: Following on from Error 9, the blogger that Hansen’s Eq. (3) did not present the same differential that I had used. No, of course not. It was his Eq. (13) that contained the differential, albeit in a different but functionally-identical form, and albeit that by an important typo that got past peer-review it omitted a vital factor 4.
Error 13: The blogger did not seem to understand, in her first email, that a differential is merely a snapshot of a particular point on a curve and that, therefore, the values of the variables whose relation to one another it establishes will not be likely to remain constant (except under very limited conditions that plainly do not apply here).
Error 14: So unfamiliar is the blogger with the term “fundamental equation of radiative transfer” that she attributes its usage to me: (“which you call …”). Yet the term is used throughout the literature. Again, this seems to indicate that the blogger has wandered into a field with which she is not really familiar.
Error 15: The blogger says in one of her dozens of comments on this non-issue that “It might almost be worth submitting articles rebutting things in [Energy & Environment], but I estimate 90% of the things in that Journal are wrong.” On what evidence? If I am expected to justify everything, “for that”, as she put it in an email to me, “is what we expect undergraduates to do”, surely what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? Where’s the justification for “90%”? If there’s no justification, was it reasonable to criticize me perhaps too often and too impolitely for an error which – even if it was an error – she herself made: indeed, an error of a character (albeit in the opposite direction) that Kiehl & Trenberth also made, in not appreciating that surface temperature is not governed stricto sensu by the fundamental equation of radiative transfer at the surface, not least because temperature is influenced by the non-radiative transports?
Error 16: The blogger said my Commentary for Remote Sensing was largely irrelevant to a discussion of Spencer & Braswell’s paper on the cloud feedback, which he finds as strongly negative as the IPCC finds it strongly positive. However, the opening sentence of my Commentary made it clear that I was responding to Trenberth’s Commentary on Spencer & Braswell’s paper in that journal. Trenberth had cited ten papers that had attempted to determine climate sensitivity empirically: my own Commentary pointed out, inter alia, and surely not unreasonably, that four of these found climate sensitivity low, and that there were many other papers, not cited by Trenberth, that also found low sensitivities.
Finally, there were many unkindnesses and discourtesies in this blogger’s postings, her comments, and her entire approach. Others here have pointed these out. It is unfortunate that she was so very determined to fault-find right from the get-go that she threw both math and manners to the winds.
Oh well, Nahle out, TAO dataset in. This reminds me of a quote, “when the data changes, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
The bad news, I lost what I thought was a set of actual longwave data, although I will admit I only used it because it was all I had, and was pretty sure that Nahle’s idea that there was no backscatter was wrong (it making no sense). Thought I was on to something there to…
The good news, at least I now know where to look for at least some actual longwave data.
Now where can I find out:
Longwave data change over many decades (if any), and…
How the IPCC (and anyone else) tells how much of this longwave is backscatter and how much is simply hot air and water rising?
Two posters to this site reported ancedotal evidence that said that longwave radiation had not changed over up to 35 years. If true, that means that since CO2 has increased, it caused no effect that could cause CAGW. However, now that I see that the skies radiation is 420W, it may simply be that the amount is so small compared to that that they cannot see it from the noise. If there is an amount, then the question is, is a few Watts enough for any noticable warming? If we have a reliable decades long longwave dataset, we can detirmine this. The key word is reliable.
And now I wonder such things as:
Should we see more backscatter in areas where CO2 is higher (all else being equel)?
If we do not, does this invalidate CAGW?
If we are downwind of a major urban area (a good place to find a CO2 pocket), is any increase in longwave due to backscatter or simply rising hot air from the city?
Do urban heat island effects also show up as longwave from the sky, backscatter of the UHI?
Are there any CO2 pockets at sea, where we would not have UHI effects?
Also, now I wouold like to see longwave compared to accurate (as in no UHI) temerature measurements, to see if warming from El Nino or solar activity, or cooling from valcanic activity or La Nina, also change backscatter and warm air rising that also contributing to longwave (assuming one can tell one from the other). After all, just because there is more longwave does not mean it caused warming, it may be the other way around. If longwave can be local, that is, a hot urban area increases local longwave, then I would want longwave measurements from rural areas, or ocean areas. And i would really like to see longwave measured before 1950, when there was noticably less man made CO2 (or so they say), if longwave during the warmer times back then (say 1938) was the same as similarly warm times now, then warmth causes backscatter, backscatter does not cause warmth, and thus CO2 does not increase backscatter, or not enough to matter.
Mote in the other’s eye, beam in one’s own.
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Puzzle Master Lord Monckton,
This has been interesting and taken me some think get a handle on, You said, “Strictly speaking, one should also add the non-radiative transports of 78 Watts per square meter for evapo-transpiration and 24 for thermal convection (see Kimoto, 2009, for a discussion) to the 390 Watts per square meter of radiative flux, reducing Kiehl and Trenberth’s implicit Planck parameter from 0.18 to 0.15. Either 0.15 or 0.18 gives a climate sensitivity ~1 K.”
Staying out of how implicit the Plank parameter may be, shouldn’t it be latent + thermal+Net radiative flux? Actually, latent + thermal + absorptive radiative Flux + radiative window Flux, to fine tune things?
The Old Man and the Sea.
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If the ‘toon’s false writ
You must acquit.
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Apostrophe in the ‘toon’s, too. Sorry, Ma.
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Much gracious, mods.
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My good Lord Monckton,
http://ourhydrogeneconomy.blogspot.com/2011/10/supplimental-issues-for-whats-not-good.html
Forgive the confusing thought process, but this appears to be the approximate drawing you used to imply that “implicit” Planck parameters where on the K&T drawing. The same information is on the K&T drawing, only hidden somewhat by that monstrous 324Wm-2. Any reward if this is a correct solution to the puzzle? 🙂
Monckton of Brenchley says:
October 2, 2011 at 10:41 pm
At one point she seems to imply that temperature causes radiative flux, when it is of course the other way about. Kiehl & Trenberth were incorrect to assume that one can apply the fundamental equation of radiative transfer strictly at the Earth’s surface to derive outgoing radiative flux from it, so as (again, proceeding in the wrong direction) to derive a value for surface outgoing radiation from the measured value for surface temperature, not least because that measured value is dependent not only on the radiative transport but also on the non-radiative transports from the surface. Evaporation, for instance, cools the surface, and does so at a rate thrice that in the models. Kimoto, whom I had cited, was doing his best to make some allowance for Kiehl & Trenberth’s error here.
Actually it is you who has made the error here, K&T are correct, the radiative flux from the surface is given by the the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Convective and other fluxes are additional to the radiative flux, you can verify this by reading an undergraduate text on Radiative Heat Transport, such as one of those by Hoyt C. Hottel.
Additionally the ‘fundamental equation of radiation transfer’ in atmospheres would be the Swarzschild equation, which is possibly a source of confusion.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
October 1, 2011 at 7:36 am
“The fact is that Lucia has gotten far more of her math wrong in this than I have”.
Did Lord Monckton really write all the line above? There are a two odd things about the style.
First of all he used “math” as the short form of “mathematics.” No British person would write that. To us it is “maths” with an “s”. Second, he used “gotten” which was correct in Elizabethan English but today we use “got” as the past tense.
Is an American trying to impersonate Lord Monckton or has the noble lord forgotten (yes, we still use the long form “gotten” in the word “forgotten”) how to speak the Queen’s English?
Anthro CO2 fighting to keep the Sun on the line, and losing.
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Phil.,
Are K&T correct if their intent was to exclude significant physical mechanisms in their calculation of energy/heat lost from the surface? And even though their approach can be viewed as significantly incomplete in a fundamental sense?
John
From his classic education, his impeccable sense of the poetry in language that, like Shakespeare’s, challenges us to improve our own, his mathematical genius, his implicit commitment to spiritual values, his wicked sense of humour and skill in fighting by disarming his opponent, and his passion for integrity, Monckton is upholding and demonstrating Civilization itself in a way I seldom see equalled outside of good novels and films. He models what most of us dream. Probably took a lifetime to learn – and still learning, as is evident by his doubtless conscious adoption of americanisms which, in the context of the New World of blogging, give delicate seasoning to the meat of his arguments.
Thank you sir. I don’t have the patience to rigorously check your math this time (though I have previously), but when I see your words, I know I can trust you, not to be infallible, but to follow Scientific Method with the thoroughness of a spiritual discipline, and to keep focussed on what matters.
Thanks again for this sequel Anthony, I have republished this also as an addendum to the original article, at the UKIP Scotland Blog website. Readers, please see the many Lord Monckton Videos, and other related material at that website. Thank You.
John Whitman says:
October 4, 2011 at 11:38 am
Phil. says:
October 4, 2011 at 9:03 am
@Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Actually it is you who has made the error here, K&T are correct, the radiative flux from the surface is given by the the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Convective and other fluxes are additional to the radiative flux, you can verify this by reading an undergraduate text on Radiative Heat Transport, such as one of those by Hoyt C. Hottel.
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Phil.,
Are K&T correct if their intent was to exclude significant physical mechanisms in their calculation of energy/heat lost from the surface? And even though their approach can be viewed as significantly incomplete in a fundamental sense?
Since K&T included the significant physical mechanisms of energy loss from the surface I’m not sure what your point is.
Bah. I’m getting really tired of this disingenuous excuse. I invite you, Mason, to consider and describe for us what would have ensued had you addressed a headmaster or upperclassman by their surname. Be graphic.
A fine and interesting contribution, but you’re letting some sloppy Americanisms contaminate your prose:
“the air
loosesloses its energy and then falls creating high pressure zones.”Sitting
hearhere in Glasgow in the gloom of a rainy dayAnd this is a particularly Scottish golfing reference, which could be made clearer:
“it’s a one club solution “. Anent which, I’ve been having some success cultivating a close-in chipping technique, which amounts to using a putting stroke with a long iron, usually a 3. 😉
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Your albedo-oriented commentary would meld well with the AH specific-heat critique cited elsewhere in this thread, methinks.